NRSC 4132 Blog

The World Wide Web recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and what a lot of growing up it has done! August 6, 2011 marked the 20th anniversary of the launch of the very first web page by Tim Berners-Lee. On it he wrote,? The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.? So think about that for a minute. The World Wide Web was invented so that scientists could collaborate. 20 years on how are we doing?

Today most traditionally published journals have websites and are available in electronic format. There are numerous open access publications such as PloS Biology that are web based and free to peruse. Scientific information is available in all manner of places. There are dedicated search engines such as Scirus as well as huge public databases for research such as PubMed. The scientific community hasn?t done a bad job using the WWW as a new platform for publishing, but what about that last sentiment ?Collaborators welcome,?? Berners-Lee was seeking the input and help of people who he was now connected to by computer. The WWW was a new way to connect and share. It grew because people from across the globe recognized its potential and worked together to make it what it is today: a network linking billions of people and their ideas. While journals are more than happy to use the web as a new platform to publish, scientists still have not fully embraced the notion that the web is also a great tool for collaboration. However, several innovations give me hope that someday researchers will reap the full benefits of the WWW.

For instance, the site Nature Precedings is a preprint repository for the Earth sciences that allows researchers to submit papers and receive feedback in the form of comments and votes to help improve the quality of the work. Not only is this site a permanent citeable archive, it is also a place where researchers are able to go to discuss their work and others?. This type of collaboration is no doubt something Tim Berners-Lee would approve of.

Another great thing about the World Wide Web regarding science, is that now research is available in so many different formats that anyone can keep up on the latest science news. The primary literature is good for some, but even people with no science background can enjoy and learn from a post on Neuroscience News, or any number of well written and entertaining science blogs. I feel that science often gets a bad rap for being tedious and difficult to understand, but the web has done so much to dispel that myth and show people how wonderful, fun, and important science really is. So Happy Birthday WWW! You?re doing a great job. Keep it up.