If you’ve been around either myself or Deepak Singh you will almost certainly have heard the Jeff Jonas/Jon Udell soundbite: ‘Data finds data. Then people find people’. The naïve analysis of the success of consumer social networks and the weaknesses of science communication has lead to efforts that almost precisely invert the Jonas/Udell concept. In the case of most of these “Facebooks for Scientists” the idea is that people find people, and then they connect with data through those people. But what if we built social networks for data, where they could interact, find neighbours, and play games amongst themselves?

I wrote a few weeks back about the idea of re-imagining the formally published scientific paper as an aggregation of objects. I asserted that the tools for achieving this are more or less in place. Actually that is only half true. The tools for storing, displaying, and even to some extent archiving communications in this form do exist, at least in the form of examples. But we still need authoring and publishing tools to make the overall vision work.

There has been an awful lot recently written and said about author-pays business models for scholarly publishing and a lot of it has focussed on PLoS ONE. Most recently Kent Andersen has written a piece on Scholarly Kitchen that contains a number of fairly serious misconceptions about the processes of PLoS ONE. This is a shame because I feel this has muddled the much more interesting question that was intended to be the focus of his piece. Nonetheless here I want to give a robust defence of author pays models and of PLoS ONE in particular.

Friday and Saturday last week I had the privilege of attending the first Sage Congress. Hopefully this will be the first in a series of posts that cover that meeting because there is simply so much to think about and so much to just get on and do. This is not a post about public engagement work by scientists. It is not about going to schools and giving talks. It is not about engaging with the main stream media to present your work to the great unwashed. It is about engaging with the people who will be driving your research agenda within ten years, about how the way researchers connect with society will be changed over the next decade whether they like it or not.

On April 26 I am attending a joint meeting of the NSF and EuroHORCS (European Heads of Research Councils) on “Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age”. I have been asked to submit a one page white paper in advance of the meeting and have been struggling a little with this. This is stage one, a draft document relating to researcher identifiers.

Suddenly it seems everyone wants to re-imagine scientific communication. From the ACS symposium a few weeks back to a PLoS Forum, via interesting conversations with a range of publishers, funders and scientists, it seems a lot of people are thinking much more seriously about how to make scientific communication more effective, more appropriate to the 21st century and above all, to take more advantage of the power of the web. For me, the “paper” of the future has to encompass much more than just the narrative descriptions of processed results we have today. Here I discuss the idea of the research communication as an aggregation of objects that are linked together into a story by an “editor”. This has the potential both to encompass what papers look like today and prepare us for a much more diverse future. At the same time if we built our research communications this way we get the semantic web for research data more or less as a free extra.