{"id":3019,"date":"2008-10-07T09:45:28","date_gmt":"2008-10-07T09:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/07\/whats-the-matter-with-biologis\/"},"modified":"2008-10-07T09:45:28","modified_gmt":"2008-10-07T09:45:28","slug":"whats-the-matter-with-biologis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/07\/whats-the-matter-with-biologis\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the Matter With Biologists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server<\/a> for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World<\/cite> reminiscing about the rise of the Internet<\/a>, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video<\/a>, microblogging<\/a>), which included a wealth of fascinating information about the current operation of the arxiv.<\/p>\n

In both of these, he mentions that the arxiv grew out of a pre-existing preprint culture in high-energy theoretical physics. People in the field would make copies of their manuscripts in progress, and send them to other people in the field, for comments entirely outside of the normal publication system.<\/p>\n

It occurs to me that there’s something really remarkable about this: physicists have the reputation of being arrogant and hard to deal with, and theoretical high-energy physicists are regarded as arrogant SOB’s by other physicists<\/strong>. It’s really kind of amazing that this community, of all the research communities in the world, was the one to develop the preprint culture and then the arxiv.<\/p>\n

Looked at this way, it also makes me wonder: What’s wrong with biologists, anyway?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Biology, after all, is widely regarded as the most open and welcoming of all the natural sciences. The only field with a kindlier reputation among students is psychology, and that’s only half a science (the other half is social-science). If you were going to guess a field that would’ve been among the first to embrace the idea of sharing pre-publication results, you might very well have guessed that it would be a subdiscipline of biology.<\/p>\n

And yet, even today, seventeen years after the launch of the arxiv, every attempt to set up a preprint service for biologists has been a dismal failure, as noted by both Ginsparg and Timo Hannay (whose Science21 talk notes<\/a> are up at Nature Networks. You can also get video<\/a> and microblogging<\/a>). Contrary to what a naive outsider’s opinion might suggest, biologists appear to be highly resistant to the whole idea of sharing pre-publication results.<\/p>\n

So what’s the deal? Why are the prickly bastards in high-energy theory so open to sharing, while the squishy and lovable biologists guard their research so jealously?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World reminiscing about the rise of the Internet, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video, microblogging), which included a wealth of fascinating information about the current… Continue reading What’s the Matter With Biologists?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}