THIS ARTICLE IS MORE THAN FIVE YEARS OLD
This article is more than five years old. Autism research — and science in general — is constantly evolving, so older articles may contain information or theories that have been reevaluated since their original publication date.
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Chat with any scientist at a conference or over coffee, and theyʼre free with their opinions, about their own work or their colleaguesʼ.
Ask them to put it in writing, especially online, and they suddenly turn shy.
Hopefully, that’s about to change.
Any scientist will tell you that itʼs the details behind a paper that are important: How were the experiments done? What were the controls? Did they take into account such and such confounding factors?
A well-written paper may provide all those facts, but there are crucial bits that are never publicized: which experiments didnʼt work, for example, and why ― details that can be just as important.
The interactive web offers opportunities beyond these traditional papers ― to create online lab notebooks that reveal those missing pieces, and to collaborate and exchange ideas online.
Perhaps the most successful example of this is MITʼs OpenWetWare project, a wiki on lab protocols and know-how. There are others, including UsefulChem, Chembark, Nature Network, a social network for scientists; Nature Precedings, where researchers can comment on unpublished manuscripts, and PLoS ONE, which allows users to annotate and comment on papers.
At the foundation, we too have plans to launch interactive services through which scientists who work on autism can “talk” to each other online.
As these sites proliferate, more and more scientists are getting comfortable on the Web, according to an article in the April Scientific American ― and I agree.
Some of my sources have ventured into LinkedIn, a professional networking site. Others are my “friends” on Facebook, and seem perfectly comfortable navigating its bewildering world. Some have themselves become bloggers, most notably on ScienceBlogs and 3 Quarks Daily.
Some scientists of course remain wary because sharing unpublished data is fraught with perils, real and imagined. But as they realize that the benefits far outweigh the potential dangers, I hope they realize that Web2.0 is here to stay ― and start participating.
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