http://www.biomedsearch.com

The site is free, and perhaps the most comprehensive biomedical site on the web. It has all PubMed and MedLine documents, plus mililons more including full-text journal articles and a large database of theses and dissertations.

And, you don’t have to register but if you do you can use portfolios to save documents, share documents (and comment on them) between users, and set up automatic alerts.

There are hopeful signs on that front:

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-1226.html

Though as John Faughnan wryly observes:

http://jfaughnan.blogspot.com/2007/12/happy-solstice-quiet-revolution-in.html

“I wonder if Bush knew what he signed. The open access provision would have been buried deeply in the bill.”

There are at least two major impediments to the integration of scientific discourse into the information commons (as commenter 1 called it):

1. Most published scientific discourse occurs in journals that are barricaded behind paywalls. BMC, PLoS, and their ilk are welcome exceptions, but they are indeed exceptions. In my day-to-day work, most of the references I consult are accessible to me only because my institution has bought subscriptions, often for obscene sums of money. This includes all the most highly cited nonspecialist journals in which biologists regularly publish (Current Biology, Nature, Science, etc.) except PLoS Biology. The situation is a scandal for many reasons, not least that almost all the research published in these journals is paid for by grants from government agencies; it’s your tax dollars at work, but you can’t read it.

2. Academia generally doesn’t reward scientists for publishing anywhere else. At research universities, faculty members are hired, promoted, or fired largely according to their success in getting grants and publishing articles in such journals. So-called outreach is nice but unnecessary. Few faculty members, especially junior ones, feel they can afford to spend much time on such optional activities.

(Further to 1, it’s true that many of the contracts we sign with journals publishing our work allow us to post copies on our web sites. But even if we all did so, having access to all the articles in an issue of a journal via several dozen web sites would be inferior to having access to the issue itself. Aggregation matters, and aggregation of scientific discourse across the web must become far more effective in order to pose a serious challenge to the commercial publishers of scientific journals.)

Actually, I think most researchers would disagree with you on that; although not that many of them ever actually do anything about it. However, science bloggers and blog readers are a tiny fraction of “the public”, and most of them are more interested in dragging science into their feverish political views than in science itself.

I’m only suggesting that when blog discourse touches on primary scientific literature, the discourse that’s happening in the scientific context should be directly available in the blog context.

OK, to the degree that you’re talking about scientists not having to do anything, fine. (Although with cases like the one I linked earlier, I suspect a lot of researchers would actively prefer to avoid being even indirect linked to such a forum.)

I’d also note that responses and counter-responses are a relatively marginal part of “the discourse that’s happening in the scientific context”. I don’t believe I’ve ever had any on anything on which I’ve been a primary author. Bloggers have this odd reverence for peer-reviewed publications (not that responses are peer-reviewed anyway) but most discussion happens at seminars and in review articles. But as you say, if it can be done for free, it can only be a good thing.

Agreed. Improving public understanding of science isn’t part of the job description, nor is improving scientific understanding of the public. So we wind up relying on the media (and now, increasingly, the blogosphere) as mediators.

“That’s one side of it; the other is that bloggers are utterly consumed with their own cliques and wildly exaggerate the degree to which scientists should be interested in them.”

Fair point. Note that in the example I gave, though, I’m not suggesting that scientists directly monitor and try to actively influence the blog discourse (though sometimes maybe they should).

I’m only suggesting that when blog discourse touches on primary scientific literature, the discourse that’s happening in the scientific context should be directly available in the blog context. So that, for example, when the blogosphere reacts to a PLoS Medicine article, it will tend to be more aware of the scientific reaction to that same article.

In this scenario the scientific authors wouldn’t need to do anything more or different. It just that their existing process would be more fully and coherently available.

Now, this appeared in the TOP FIVE sidebar, it’s by probably the most prominent life science blogger, one who is apparently some sort of professor! Honestly, if I were to show my colleagues that post and the one it links to (“I think Collins has no academic credibility.”) they’d split their sides laughing. If I suggested they distribute their results in order to get more exposure among a bunch of retards like that, they’d have me committed.

That’s one side of it; the other is that bloggers are utterly consumed with their own cliques and wildly exaggerate the degree to which scientists should be interested in them. They also have an absurdly distorted view of science, in which their pet researchers are all major players, most research effort goes into evolution and climate change research, and the vast body of other scientists and fields barely exists.

Bottom line: as of today, there’s little for scientists to gain, by the standards by which nearly all of them would define “gain”.

Anyway- this certainly doesn’t address all of the issues raised here, but this past weekend, my CrossRef colleague, Amy Brand, was at the Science Blogging Conference where she showed a WordPress plug-in that we are creating (Movable Type soon to follow) that will allow bloggers to more easily cite formal scholarly (not just scientific) publications in a consistent (dare I say “canonical?”) way. The plug-in will allow the blog author to search the CrossRef metadata for references and then insert a formatted and DOI-linked citation directly into their blog posting. For good measure- the citation will also be backed by COinS metadata so that metadata-aware apps like Zotero, CiteUlike and Connotea can pick them up. Virtuous circle and all that.

Again- clearly this plug-in might be just a wee step in addressing the whole host of issues surrounding the interaction between formal/informal online scholarly discourse, but we are hoping that, if we at least make using DOIs a little easier, they’ll gain some more uptake in the academic blogging community.

We will post on the CrossTech blog when the plug-in is ready for distribution.

And Greg’s idea of a url2doi reverse lookup service is very interesting. We need to think about that.