Not Spaghetti

Science journalism is dying - but John Cook's new iPhone app on climate questions points the way to something much better: an at-your-fingertips database of accurate, up-to-date information at multiple levels of explanatory power, addressing common questions on potentially any subject. John's app has been covered in major media, on Real Climate, and on various blogs - I probably should have included his website in the basic climate references list I compiled some months back as well. Read on for why I think this new iPhone app, and the approach it embodies, is so important...

This essay by Rory O'Connor provides an important perspective on the future of media, in particular with some insights on the question of trust. I think the trust and credibility issue is really central to understand for the future of our information world - and particularly the future of scientific publishing where my interests lie. Rather than looking into who actually wrote something they read, people online have come to trust based on how they reach the information - via search engines, or through their social networks, for example. This article mentions the concept of "'credibility heuristics' -- a kind of information Verisign" - up to now, media "brand" (the names of major newspapers, TV networks, etc) has been a central shortcut for many people's perspective on the world - they knew they could trust certain brands to mostly provide them with important, reliable information.

Over at Lucia's blog on an essentially open thread, there was some back and forth on peer review, the merits and barriers to formal publication vs blogs, and so forth. My old friend Joel Shore responded to a comment on science journals expanding faster than the speed of light with a possible source, and mentioned the size of the Physical Review journals doubling every decade.

Since I work there, I thought I'd respond with more up to date data, and also added some thoughts on peer review related to some commentary on a simple diagrammatic explanation of journalistic practice, recently posted by Jay Rosen. My comments follow.

For what it’s worth, Physical Review publication statistics are available online here (2007 numbers):

http://forms.aps.org/general/annstats07.pdf