Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy

Abstract

Scientific discovery occurs in the lab one experiment at a time, but science itself moves forward based on a series of ongoing conversations, from a Nobel Prize winner's acceptance speech to collegial chats at a pub. When these conversations flow into the mainstream, they nurture the development of an informed public who understand the value of funding basic research and making evidence-based voting decisions. It is in the interests of scientists and academic institutions alike to bring these conversations into the public sphere. With 39% of American Internet users reading at least one of the over 112 million blogs on the Internet, blogs represent a means of information dispersal with unprecedented power [1]. Science blogs have carved out a small but influential niche, with an estimated number of over 1,200 [2]. One of the most popular science blogs, Pharyngula, began as a classroom teaching tool and now logs over 1.5 million visitors and thousands of new comments each month (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/). The blog aims to provide a universal, interactive rallying point for understanding and discussing evolutionary development, and is led by a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Pharyngula's popularity demonstrates how a small blog can rapidly skyrocket in readership and should encourage those concerned about science literacy in America. Furthermore, blogs can have a substantial impact on traditional academia by providing a quick forum for public peer review of research. For example, in 2005 Reed Cartwright, postdoctoral fellow and blogger at De Rerum Natura (http://dererumnatura.us/), disagreed with the conclusions of a paper in Nature [3] and posited what he argued was a more probable interpretation of the data on his blog [4]. University of Washington researcher Luca Comai was about to publish a letter to the editor arguing for the same alternate hypothesis when he read Cartwright's blog, and realized he had been beaten to the punch. In the end, the blogger and researcher made their case in a jointly authored paper in Plant Cell [5]. Because many science bloggers are practicing scientists or experts in their field, they can provide a unique educational bridge between academia and the public and distill important experimental findings into an accessible, interactive format. Yet academic institutions have been slow to appreciate blogs as valuable mediums for facilitating scholarly discussion, illustrated by the lack of institutional blogs or blogs by established academics. It is true that few quality-control or vetting mechanisms exist to help readers evaluate a blog, which typically earns its reputation based on the blogger's credentials and reader feedback. Yet both academic institutions and blogs aim to engage and educate the public and advance scientific knowledge and discussion. By combining the credibility of institutions—trusted gate-keepers for scientific truth—with the immediacy and networking infrastructure of blogs, we believe that these shared goals can be better served with benefits to both partners. We propose a roadmap for turning blogs into institutional educational tools and present examples of successful collaborations that can serve as a model for such efforts. We offer suggestions for improving upon the traditionally used blog platform to make it more palatable to institutional hosts and more trustworthy to readers; creating mechanisms for institutions to provide appropriate (but not stifling) oversight to blogs and to facilitate high-quality interactions between blogs, institutions, and readers; and incorporating blogs into meta-conversations within and between institutions.