Geotweeps Discuss...

Our starting point is an opinion piece in the Guardian by Sarah Kendrew (@sarahkendrew) which took on some negative opinions expressed about blogging in a Q+A by physicists Brian Cox (TVs current stand-in-exotic-place-staring-moodily-into-space icon) and Jeff Forshaw.

How you feel about this issue depends on how you interpret the scope of the question (and the answers) and Sarah’s piece makes some excellent points about how in physics at least, things like the arXiv pre-print server make things much less clear-cut than they once were; findings are making the news before they have been formally peer-reviewed and published. But that’s not quite the same as blogging your results as you get them (which, as Sarah also points, out, some people are trying out too). Over to Brian Romans:

As demonstrated by the link above, Brian is an exemplar of using his blog to provide a more accessible account of his own research; but, as he says, only after it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Which is exactly what Brian did:

Of course, one of the assumptions of the discussion thus far is that the current peer review+publication model, whilst not without its problems, is ‘a bad system that just happens to be better than all the other possible ones’. Not everyone agrees with this, and criticisms in the open/closed debate often spill into criticism of the current system of peer review, too. 

Of course, this is a bit of a digression. It seems the consensus in the geoblogosphere is that blogging about your research is that it should accompany publication, rather than replace it. But we still think there is something to learn from the physicists: