Adding a tag for Creative Commons-licensed posts

By Dave Munger | January 5, 2009

We'd like to add a tag for posts that are licensed under Creative Commons, thus allowing them to be freely distributed with some restrictions. [What we're talking about here is the *blog post* content, not the *journal article* the post references]

However, ideally we'd just add one additional tag -- we don't want to clutter up our interface. While we realize that the particular license can be very important to users, we think at this point having just one tag on our site will be the least confusing.

So, if you wanted to express the idea that a post has a Creative Commons license in just one or two words, how would you do it? Here are a few ideas. Let us know which you prefer, or if you have additional suggestions, in the comments:

Topics: Administration | 3 Comments »

Interesting issues in the forums

By Dave Munger | December 16, 2008

The ResearchBlogging.org Forums are steadily building a userbase.

It's a great place to ask questions, find out what other users are up to, and get advice about blogging in general and using ResearchBlogging.org in particular. Here are some of the interesting threads:

Anyone can read the forums, but we encourage you to register so you can respond to comments or start your own thread.

Finally, don't forget: In two days, on December 18, blog about one of the thousands of open-access papers published on PLoS ONE. We'll pick the best post and promote it here and on the PLoS blog, plus award an exciting assortment of prizes! It's a great way to support open access and be rewarded in the process!

Topics: Administration | No Comments »

Help celebrate PLoS ONE’s second birthday on ResearchBlogging.org

By Dave Munger | December 11, 2008

PLoS ONE turns two this month, and to celebrate, they're partnering with ResearchBlogging.org to make history on December 18.

On that day, we're asking bloggers to write about one of the thousands of articles that have appeared on PLoS ONE in the past two years, in a synchroblogging event of epic proportions. It might just be the biggest day ever for blogging about peer-reviewed research. Want to participate? Visit the PloS ONE blog for more info. I've also reposted their instructions below.

PLoS ONE turns two this December. For our community celebration we're going to run our second synchroblogging competition. The first one was organized to celebrate the first ever Open Access Day this year and resulted in 400 posts and two winners Greg Laden and Dorothea Salo who each received some nice swag. This time, we've partnered up with our friends at researchblogging.org, the site that aggregates blogs about peer-reviewed research, to create this competition.

To take part, all you have to do is:

1. Register on researchblogging.org

2. On December 18, 2008, blog about a PLoS ONE paper past or present and use the icon provided by researchblogging.org so the link to your post appears on their site (if you have any technical difficulties doing this simply send your post to Bora Zivkovic, bzivkovic@plos.org, our community manager and he'll help you out).

3. We'll also use Google News/Technorati to track entries - to make this easier please use the phrase "PLoS ONE @ Two" in your post. Finally, we'd like you to try and track back to our original article, here are some instructions.

We've assembled a small team of judges who will review all these posts and vote on a winner. They will be looking for well organized posts from qualified individuals that set the research in broader context and add to the debate around the paper by posing questions on it.

The winning post will have their entry cross posted on the PLoS ONE Blog and A Blog Around the Clock. They will also receive a bag of swag that includes: the new PLoS Water bottle (H2go brand) and a couple of cool PLoS t-shirts.

In your eagerness to get involved, please don't post before December 18, 2008, we really want to make a noise for our birthday.

Topics: News | No Comments »

Improvements and bug fixes at ResearchBlogging.org

By Dave Munger | December 1, 2008

Our developers were hard at work over the holiday weekend with several fixes and site enhancements.

We rely on our readers and users to alert us to potential problems and offer suggestions for improving the site -- and we'd love to hear from you. You can offer suggestions and ask for help in our support forums. Or, make a comment on a relevant post in ResearchBlogging.org News. Or email us at admin@researchblogging.org.

Topics: News | No Comments »

A new level of user support: ResearchBlogging.org forums

By Dave Munger | November 24, 2008

We're pleased to announce a new way to support our users: the ResearchBlogging.org support forums. These forums were created in partnership with SMG Technology, who developed the software that runs ResearchBlogging.org.

The forums will allow users to quickly alert us to potential problems, and also to offer support to each other. As many experienced technology users know, user forums are often the best way to learn how to use and troubleshoot complex systems.

We've chosen a bare-bones, no-nonsense platform that should allow users to quickly find the information they need, with a minimum of fuss.

We anticipate that bloggers will use the forums not only to troubleshoot, but also to help us plan future directions for ResearchBlogging.org. For example, bloggers in languages that we don't currently support can work to build communities large enough to become supported by our site.

The forums will also offer a way for bloggers to organize their own research projects and even conduct discussions completely unrelated to ResearchBlogging.org with like-minded bloggers and others from across the internet.

We will provide the first level of support to users experiencing problems using our site via the forums and email, if necessary. SMG Technology will provide high-level support if there are issues that exceed our level of expertise.

Take a moment to sign up for the forums and introduce yourself. Then come back in a day or two to see what everyone else is saying about ResearchBlogging.org.

Topics: News, Administration | No Comments »

Publicity for your posts: The ResearchBlogging.org widget

By Dave Munger | November 20, 2008

We have developed a widget will allow bloggers to post a feed of ResearchBlogging.org posts on their blogs. You can see it in action on any of the blogs at ScienceBlogs, as well as on the ScienceBlogs channel pages.

What's really cool about the widget is that it is completely customizable. The look of the widget itself is controlled by CSS, and the topics that the widget delivers is also customizable by page. As an example, compare what's on widget on the Physical Science channel to the Medicine and Health channel. Completely different content, based on how the ResearchBlogging.org member blogger tagged her or his posts.

The widget is not yet available for all bloggers to use, but because the widget is already placed on the high-traffic blogs of ScienceBlogs.com, if you post to ResearchBlogging.org, the widget should help direct more readers your way.

We're testing the widget on ScienceBlogs.com for now, and soon we'll be able to roll it out on individual blogs for additional testing, and ultimately anyone who wants to use it will be able to.

There's more in the pipeline, so stay tuned to this blog and ResearchBlogging.org for exciting new developments!

Topics: News | No Comments »

Do we need a new rule for pseudoscience/crackpots?

By Dave Munger | September 29, 2008

Our guidelines for individual posts and registering blogs are fairly robust: They allow us to take a careful look at posts and blogs to decide whether they should be allowed on ResearchBlogging.org.

But as ResearchBlogging.org becomes a higher-profile organization, it also increasingly becomes the target of pseudoscientists and crackpots advancing personal agendas that are not supported by serious research.

Because these individuals are highly motivated, they often take special care to couch their blogs in the trappings of legitimate research. Still, it doesn't take long for a serious researcher to examine their work and see through the veneer to the real agenda behind it.

What does take a long time -- what is, in the end, nearly impossible -- is convincing the pseudoscientist/crackpot that her/his blog does not represent real research, and therefore isn't acceptable.

But we don't need to convince them -- what we need to do is to convince our readers that we have real standards. From this arises the question: Should we have a new rule designed to eliminate pseudoscientists and crackpots from consideration without the benefit of extensive deliberation?

As it currently stands, if a blog is rejected due to insufficient rigor, the blogger is given the opportunity to defend him/herself publicly on this blog. We've done that once before, and our decision wasn't changed. We're currently working behind the scenes on two other such requests. Handling these requests according to our existing guidelines takes a lot of time and effort. We have to recruit experts in the relevant fields to accumulate evidence that the blogs should not be approved for our site. But we already know these blogs are unacceptable -- this is essentially wasted effort.

I think we ought to give site administrators the latitude to reject obviously pseudoscientific / "crackpot" blogs simply by consulting informally among themselves and their colleagues -- just as they already have the latitude to approve blogs that are obviously high quality. Only on true borderline cases should a formal review or public debate be necessary. But maybe our readers disagree -- perhaps such a review is essential to the site's mission.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments. Or make a post on your own blog, then post the link here.

Topics: Administration | 6 Comments »

Where will science blogging go from here?

By Dave Munger | September 23, 2008

ResearchBlogging.orgIn 2007, Bora Zivkovic estimated the number of science blogs at 1,000 - 1,200. Now, over a year later, I suspect that figure is outdated. We have over 450 blogs registered for ResearchBlogging.org, but only half of the blogs at scienceblogs.com are registered. Nature Network, with its hundred or so blogs, is not represented at all because their blogging software isn't compatible with our system. Scientific Blogging, larger than the Nature Network, barely has a presence here. There are whole disciplines, like economics, history, and mathematics, with large numbers of bloggers, but which don't typically fit into our "peer-review" requirement. And then there are science blogs written in non-English languages. If I had to venture a guess today, I'd put the number between 3,000 and 10,000 science blogs worldwide.

In their article published today in PLoS Biology, Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith discuss the current impact of science blogging. They point to examples of science bloggers leading to corrections in the peer-reviewed literature, to researchers from institutions like Stanford and Oxford keeping in touch with their colleagues via blogs, and bloggers providing science information in language that laypeople can understand.

But how will bloggers and readers be able to distinguish scientific fact from fiction? Batts and her colleagues place a lot of the burden for that on ResearchBlogging.org:

To be included on the site, a blog must demonstrate to the site's organizers via a submitted form that it regularly produces posts that would meet the criteria for use of the icon. Once included, it's then up to the blogger to decide which posts meet a set of detailed guidelines for use of the icon. Dave Munger, the initiative's cofounder and president, describes the project as largely self-regulating. Readers are encouraged to report abuses of the icon, which may lead to the permanent removal of a blog. This happened in the case of an anti-evolution blog that had coopted the system, attempting to use the icon while posting non-peer-reviewed “studies” about creationism. A reader reported the abuse, and after a review by the moderators, the blog was denied future use of ResearchBlogging.org. This system illustrates that with a bit of technical savvy, a few guidelines, and an involved readership, the self-regulating style of the blogosphere can be harnessed in new ways that could prove useful for institutional science outreach.

As Batts et al. point out, the goal of scientific accuracy can only be met with the participation of readers. While the administrators of ResearchBlogging.org are on the lookout for abuses, we aren't experts in every field, and we rely on reader input to locate posts that violate our guidelines. If you spot a post that you believe doesn't accurately and thoughtfully report on peer-reviewed research, please use the "flag post" button to report it. Administrators can easily see all the posts that have been flagged, then make a decision on how to proceed.

Shelley A. Batts, Nicholas J. Anthis, Tara C. Smith (2008). Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy PLoS Biology, 6 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240

Topics: Opinion, News | 2 Comments »

ResearchBlogging.org in The Economist

By Dave Munger | September 22, 2008

An article in The Economist makes significant mention of ResearchBlogging.org:

Earlier this month Seed Media Group, a firm based in New York, launched the latest version of Research Blogging, a website which acts as a hub for scientists to discuss peer-reviewed science. Such discussions, the internet-era equivalent of the journal club, have hitherto been strewn across the web, making them hard to find, navigate and follow. The new portal provides users with tools to label blog posts about particular pieces of research, which are then aggregated, indexed and made available online.

It's great to see that efforts of bloggers to get together online and build a larger research community are starting to get recognized in the mainstream media. We're working to reach out to other mainstream media outlets in the future -- look for more of this sort of thing down the line!

One small correction: while we're glad to get the mention (and we've noticed a few econ/social science blogs registering in the aftermath of the article), the description is a bit misleading. While Seed has devoted considerable resources to our site, and will continue to donate hosting and technical support to the site, we are not a part of Seed: we are a separate, nonprofit organization.

Topics: News | No Comments »

Growing ResearchBlogging.org

By Dave Munger | September 9, 2008

We've had a great response to the new ResearchBlogging.org site, and we still believe the big crunch is yet to come. Mainstream media is slow to respond to developments online, especially in science, so we expect news reports to trickle in over the next month or so.

But we're not going to wait for them; we're already thinking about how to continue growing. Here are some potential avenues for growth and some of the issues that come along with that growth.

1. Expand our existing userbase. The simplest growth path is simply to increase the number of blogs represented, the number of posts indexed, and the number of readers using our service. This requires little effort on our part, and there are no technological hurdles other than offering new features that our users request. There are a number of ways to do this.

2. Add additional languages. Once again, we already have the technology to support multiple languages. The difficulty here is administrative effort. In order to support additional languages, we must have administrators who speak that language -- at least three per language. We need to recruit bloggers who speak those languages. All this can be time consuming, and our current admins are already burdened with supporting our existing languages and their own blogs and research. Still, we are committed to adding new languages. We've seen the most interest from Spanish, French, and Italian-language communities, and we are reaching out to Asian language communities such as Chinese and Japanese.

3. Expand the disciplines we cover and / or the scope of posts we accept. We received an email recently from Andrew Cullison discussing difficulties faced by Philosophy bloggers using our system:

I'm a philosophy professor, and I just registered my site with Research Blogging. It seems that the only acceptable bit of research that will generate a citation is a journal article. What if the peer-reviewed research you're discussing is a book?

That's an excellent point, which we've discussed here before. The problem is that not all books are peer-reviewed. This is the case with journal articles as well, but with journals, unreviewed articles are the exception, whereas our sense is the situation is reversed with books.

Our definition of "peer review" in the post linked above may be broad enough to encompass peer-reviewed books, though. There are certainly many books that are reviewed by experts, have clear publication standards, and are viewed as trustworthy by experts in their field (although obviously this varies depending on which field you're talking about).

The issue becomes one of monitoring participating blogs. With journal articles, we can be relatively sure that any article discussed is peer-reviewed. With books, not so much. In an ensuing discussion Andrew and I agreed that it's more difficult to come up with a system that will nudge bloggers in the direction of citing peer-reviewed work for books than when you're dealing solely with journal articles. Here's one plan we think might work:

If you want to cite a book chapter, you are first directed a warning screen that reminds users that most books are not peer reviewed, and perhaps links to (but doesn't require visiting) a wiki page where people from different disciplines indicate which presses typically publish peer reviewed books.

So bloggers are reminded each time they generate a citation of a book that identifying peer-reviewed research is not as straightforward as it is with journal articles.

What do you think? Does it make sense to expand our system to allow easy citation of peer-reviewed books? Or would that dilute the mission of the site? Let us know in the comments.

Topics: News | 2 Comments »

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