blog.bioethics.net in Nature!

Declan Butler at Nature has written a great piece on blogging by scientists, in which he focuses in part on blogging, academic journals, and the risks associated with keeping blogs. I talked to him:

Blogs associated with traditional journals may help bridge the gap between the literature and blogs, says Glenn McGee, editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Bioethics. The leading journal in its field, it was the first to create a companion blog, Blog.Bioethics.Net. The bioethics blog allows the journal to respond faster and in different ways to public controversies, says McGee. The blog has high impact, he adds, often influencing reporting on ethical issues by the mainstream media.

Print journals cannot keep up with developments in certain fields, adds Gavin Schmidt, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who blogs at RealClimate.org with other climate scientists. The blog helps to reduce noise by setting the record straight, says Michael Mann, another RealClimate blogger and director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, citing as an example a recent post on whether hurricanes are linked to global warming (link).

McGee and Schmidt have permanent jobs, and both agree that many scientists don't blog because they fear it has a poor image and could damage their careers. Most younger biologists blog anonymously, says Roland Krause, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and a bioinformatics blogger. "Many fear that their superiors consider it a waste of time, or even dangerous," he says. Schmidt agrees: "Until blogging is seen as normal, this will continue to be a problem."