PLoS Biology: blogging and academia

Along with Shelley Batts and Nick Anthis, I have a new paper out today in PLoS Biology on academic blogging: a short commentary on potential ways to integrate blogs into academia. Nick already has a bit of the history and goals of the manuscript over at The Scientific Activist so I won't repeat those here; long story short, we started out with the goal of simply reviewing academic blogs, and the paper ended up morphing into a road map describing potential ways to integrate blogs into academia.

Many, many readers and writers in the blogosphere donated their time to send us messages about what blogging meant to them, how they had benefited, what risks they had taken, and how they saw (or would like to see) blogging evolve, and while only a few stories made it into the final manuscript, their time and input is greatly appreciated. (Nick has collected many of them here, with a hearty thanks to all who helped out).

Of course, publication is only the start of the process, and I'm happy to see one post already up about the paper. I think DrugMonkey has some great points, and I'll discuss them and hopefully some other forthcoming responses I see popping up to the paper in a later post. And of course, comments from y'all are appreciated as well.

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Congratulations!

I'm trying to write one of these non-traditional science papers at the moment (feels more like being a journalist). I'm struggling- It's not easy. So it's good to see it can be done in a good journal.