Heading Past Third Base on Summer

We’re only about four weeks out from the beginning of the Fall semester here at George Mason. Already, you can feel the campus gearing up. Today at Academic Council we went over the University’s QEP (Quality Enhancement Plan) to substantially increase undergraduate participation in scholarship and creativity over the next years. This is quite exciting to me because of how clearly valuable undergraduate research experiences are to the success of future scientists. Both at NIH and at the MBL, I got to see this first hand. Good science is inherently a creative endeavor. And when one experiences creative science during the undergraduate years, science becomes a passion.

In the meantime, I’m headed to Woods Hole next week. What’s not to love about that?

Are science bloggers part of the media–or are they scientists?

Looks like there were some fireworks at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on twittered/blogged transmission of new science.

My own sense is that this needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Some science bloggers are scientists in their own right (they conduct scholarly research and publish their results in journals–among other places). Some science bloggers are in fact journalists.

When Andrew Sullivan blogs about science, he’s clearly a journalist paid by The Atlantic. When Tyler Cowen blogs about economics, he’s an academic and holds the position of professor (at George Mason).

That said, as a journal editor, I would have real problems publishing something that had had been already put up on the web in a blog. And as a scientist, I would have real problems with a journalist blogging my results in substance (rather than in summary) before I published them myself.

Blogs and scholarship

Librarians are learning about blogs in the context of scholarship. Interesting if true. As a journal editor, I have a difficult time accepting that peer review and editing aren’t part of the crucial value-added part of publishing when scholarship is concerned.

Jim