Should we be making such a big deal about "science blogging" as such. Doesn't that make a blog a bigger deal than it should be? - Deepak Singh

A point that came up a couple of times was what does it mean to post novel scientific data on your blog. Can it be considered a unit of research to be cited, for instance can it be used to say 'We showed this first', even if someone later publishes on the same topic before you. - Michael Barton

A second point was that if blogs were ever to become 'citable' what does it then mean when applying for jobs, or grants. What is the worth compared with published articles? - Michael Barton

Well, I'd extend that beyond blogs. A blog is just way of maintaining a web presence. The important questions are: What are the best ways for scientists to share information via the web? How can that be cited? What are the implications? - Deepak Singh

Just from my point of view, the last two questions you wrote received a lot of discussion. I think once blog posts start getting cited the line gets blurry between journal articles and blog posts. Setting aside the importance of peer review, how can a blog be cited? When you cite a blog post you giving scientific 'points' to it. Someone also pointed out that the text and time stamps of blog posts can be manipulated after publication, which is not the case for published manuscripts. - Michael Barton

I prefer to think of "scientific web presence" as something equivalent to "scientific meeting presence". It is not something that count on your CV, but few scientists would argue that it is not important to know the right people (not to mention the importance of them knowing you). - Lars Juhl Jensen

Also, if you write blog posts that you think should be considered citable non-peer-reviewed research, no one prevents you from submitting this work to a repository such as Nature Preceedings. EDIT: this would also address the issue of having an authoritative time stamp on your work. - Lars Juhl Jensen

That's a good point about nature preceedings. A DOI to an immutable body of text and timestamp would prevent any questions of post publication editing. Nevertheless, would you want to submit every blog post to NP, and I don't NP would accept it either. Following this point, the was also discussion as to if blogging becomes a citeable unit then it could be used to 'stake out' scientific territory, which would obviously be bad. - Michael Barton

No, I clearly would not want to submit every blog post to NP. To be honest I have not submitted any so far, but I do consider submitting the ones that contain new primary research results. - Lars Juhl Jensen

I used and like NP, but I guess it would be good if there was some way of getting a NP-type third party timestamp for blog posts to verify data and format of the text as it was written and published. Even with this verification, today gave me the impression there would still be a large debate as to what a blog post describing novel results means. - Michael Barton

Michael, we agree - what has held me back was both the work involved in reformatting a blog post to a PDF file and the feeling that it doesn't make sense to duplicate the content by putting it both on my blog and in NP. It surprises me that people are debating what "describing novel results" means - I assumed that it would mean exactly the same as it does when writing a paper. But maybe the point is that for a paper the peer reviewers are the ones who judge whether you have novel results or not? - Lars Juhl Jensen

The example in the final session, was that if you discuss a piece of novel research on your blog, that is later published in journal by someone else, what rights do you have in terms of claiming you were first with the results? I guess the discussion wasn't so much on what is novel results, as differing importance of publishing first on a blog vs. first in a journal. - Michael Barton

I see. I guess it is one of those problems I don't even think about because of my blogging strategy: the research results that I put on my blog at the ones that I don't think it is worth my time trying to make a paper out of. If someone else wants to pick up the ball and run with it, then I really have no reason to feel scooped. But can see that this might be a problem for others. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Fascinating discussion alright. Just to clarify my above statement about web presence, I was referring narrowly to content management systems, of which blogs are just one, probably the most common and likely type, but you can't ignore Wikis or a custom CMS or a Drupal-based system, etc. - Deepak Singh

I think it's possible to make sci blog citable by articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Some digital and even printed journals started to do that.But mostly in IT area, not in life sciences. If your blog is full of analytics, new ideas and hypothesis - why not? make pdf of most prominent post and write how to cite it, don't forget about copyright - Alexey

Lars, you've exactly stated my feeling about the equity between "web presence" and "conference presence". It's all about the social side of being a scientist - and it's not at all necessary to being a good scientist, really, but exchange between peers is the oil that make the machine function smoothly. And I'm oddly drawn to it, anyhow. Like Henry said, I just wanna be loved... but to be cited on that, or even on serious back-of-napkin insights, seems just silly in that format. - Heather