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By Root 399 0

from US universities, but only 300 faculty positions in physics open up. At the same time, many PhD programs drum into young scientists the idea that “success” means getting a faculty position at a research-oriented university, and anything else is a failure. The result is a tremendous logjam of scientists trying desperately to get faculty positions. As a young scientist you’re not just competing against the other 1,299 newly minted PhDs, you’re also competing with people from previous years who are still trying to get faculty jobs. As a result, many young scientists experience great and protracted anguish at their failure to get a faculty job. Even at mid-level universities, a job opening can easily draw more than 100 applicants. In such a competitive environment, 80-plus-hour workweeks are common, and as much time as possible is devoted to the goal that will result in a position at a top university: an impressive record of scientific papers. The papers also bring in the research grants and letters of recommendation necessary to be hired. Scientists who already have tenured positions continue to need grant support, which requires a strong work ethic still focused on producing papers. Given all this, how could a scientist possibly have the time to contribute to efforts such as the qwiki? They may agree in principle that they’d like the qwiki to succeed, but in practice they’re too busy writing papers and grant proposals to ave any time to contribute themselves.

The qwiki is just one of many science wikis that have been launched. Similar efforts have been made to develop wikis for genetics, string theory, chemistry, and many other subjects. Like the qwiki, many of these science wikis had great potential, and some generated considerable buzz and optimism in their fields. But most have failed to take off, foundering beneath scientists’ lack of time and motivation to contribute. Those science wikis that do succeed are usually in a supporting role for some more conventional project. Many laboratories, for example, run internal wikis as a way of storing reference materials for their experiments. Another successful wiki comes from the Polymath Project, which uses its wiki as a place to distill the most valuable insights from the Polymath collaboration. The Polymath wiki has attracted many thousands of edits, by more than 100 users, and at peak times attracts dozens of edits and thousands of pageviews per day. (Note that I set up the Polymath wiki, and am not an independent judge of its success.) Again, though, the Polymath wiki is in support of a conventional goal: solving a mathematical problem and writing a paper. In each of these cases, the wiki has not been an end in itself. Wiki-science, as promising as it might be, remains a dream.

User-Contributed Comment Sites for Science

It’s not just science wikis that are failing. Several organizations have created user-contributed comment sites where scientists can share their opinions of scientific papers, and so help other scientists decide which papers are worth reading, and which aren’t worth the effort. The idea is similar to sites such as Amazon.com, which collect customer reviews of books, electronic gadgets, and other products. As anyone who’s ever used Amazon.com knows, the reviews can be very helpful when deciding whether to buy a product. Maybe something similar would be helpful for scientists?

The user-contributed comment site with the highest profile was created by one of the most prestigious publishers in science, Nature. In 2006, Nature launched a site where scientists could write open comments on papers that had been submitted to Nature. Despite much effort and publicity, the trial was not a success. The final report terminating the trial explained:

There was a significant level of expressed interest in open peer review. . . . A small majority of those authors who did participate [in the trial] received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked