
Why have universities and established academics been slow to embrace science blogs? - robg
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240&ct=1
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mechanical_fish
I always thought this was obvious. I used to work in a top science lab, and if
I had dared to make a blog post about what the lab was actually working on I'd
have been fired immediately. How can you scoop the other labs with your big
publication if you leak information about your line of research before the
manuscript is submitted?

I might have been more free to write blog posts criticizing the work of our
peers, but perhaps not. You have to be careful what you say publicly about
your peers in your field. They're refereeing your papers and grading your
grant proposals. It pays to handle your relations with them very carefully.

It's fairly safe to blog about fields that are unrelated to yours. But that
doesn't do much for the level of blog discourse.

If we want lots of open science blogging we have to change the politics of
science funding, publishing, and career advancement -- which might happen, but
is likely to happen very slowly. We have to make it so that having a widely-
read blog is as good for one's career as quietly sitting on one's results,
saying nothing about them in public, until one can get them accepted in
_Nature_ (or _PLoS_ , for that matter) three years later. Right now, the old-
fashioned stealth approach still seems to be the better bet. Particularly when
you consider that, if you're an academic of lower rank than a chair or a dean,
and _especially_ if you don't have tenure, the public's opinion of your
research is almost immaterial -- it's the opinion of your peers that matters
for your career, and you don't need a blog to reach your peers. You need top
journal articles and a handful of scientific conferences.

