With the rise of social media, we see the Internet burst with communities in sites like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. New communities are built every day, over everything and nothing. And how do people do it? They start a blog, follow someone on twitter or like something on Facebook. How easy is it to create a Facebook group? And how often are people joining ? (Answer: all the time) That’s a very dynamic environment for communities. And let me ask you this: Did you ever pay to read a blog entry? Did you ever pay to join a Facebook group?

But lets focus on science. The scientific community still relies on a presence model, that requires writing very complex papers that can take months or even years to write. Writing a paper is a hard and long investment that either gets published or tossed in the trash. To get published it’s fed into the conference system: First comes peer review (usually the same people because the research world is not that big), and if you’re lucky it gets accepted into a conference. Now you get to present it at a conference (for which you have to pay at least 800 to 1000 dollars/euros to attend, plus travel and hotel). And finally you get an audience of 5 or less (you and the other presenters, plus a session chair). This is how it usually goes, after which it gets published into the proceedings, which almost no one will see, and into a closed digital library, which are usually pretty darn hard to search and get anything relevant (lets face it, it’s not Google).

Now, lets compare this to a blog post.

Blog posts take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to write, and costs zero dollars to publish. It by no means requires the investment of a research paper. Yet, the information flow it generates is several orders of magnitude above any conference or journal paper published today. On my last journal paper I got zero comments (for almost a year’s effort), and an unknown amount of views (the quirky closed digital libraries don’t tell you this). However, on one of my latest blog posts I got over 4000 views, and 20 comments, all in a couple of days.

Lets dig deeper. On my webpage, I can post interactive graphs, movies, full scale images, rich content. When did you see a movie embedded into a paper? Why can’t I zoom in on the graph in a journal paper, when I just did on an interactive graph over at cnn.com? Why don’t I get notified when a fellow researcher publishes a paper? And why should I pay for his paper, when I don’t pay for his posts? (Bruce Schneier comes to mind).

Why are we trying to invent the future, and rely solely on such a poor, centuries old, publication method, that is neither interactive, nor attractive? The great evolution of last hundred years is that now you can send papers in pdf via email, instead of a hard copy by snail mail. Other than that, we are pretty much in the same place, except for now conferences are all over the world, and cost more money to attend.

So, the question is simple: What is the point of scientific papers?

If you want feedback on your research, they don’t work very well – blog posts do and are not limited to a selected few. If you want to share information, conferences cost thousands of dollars and magazine subscriptions also – blogs are free and open to anyone.

Academic papers were well suited for the 1800′s and the 1900′s. They face extinction in the 2000′s. If you want to share knowledge, ideas, get feedback, and interact maybe there is another way, and we need to start thinking about it. There must be a better way.

What if, instead of publishing just on a journal or conference, authors would start a blog, where a short version (4000 words?) of it would be freely available to the community, so everyone could follow, discuss, engaged, challenge, without having to spend thousands of dollars? Pretty much like we do today, for everything else… And this is just idea #1. Feel free to challenge, dispute, prove me wrong. Leave a comment. Because you can, and we won’t charge you 1000$ to read the comments.

I’m heading to ITU-T in Geneva, to participate in the Focus Group on Identity Management meeting, a group dedicated to Identity Management part of ITU-T Study Group 17. I’m very excited to participate since Identity is a very hot topic, and bears some relevance on my PhD. And it’s actually a quite exciting time to work on Identity, specially with the recent buzz around the Microsoft <-> OpenID collaboration, which is meant to integrate Cardspace and OpenID 2.0. I’m looking forward to seeing the demos that will be shown (Higgings, OpenID, Cardspace), and to take part in the “real” work sessions that are scheduled. Hopefully I will be up to par, and can pitch in with some brain mass. Did i mention I’ll be wearing a suit ?

On a side note, I have another post on my mind – Feisty Fawn. But I’ll save that for later. For now it’s off to put my travel stuff together, load up my PSP, and pack some nice clean underwear.