I have recently finished reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson (buy it here). The premise of the book is that giving things away is not only a serious business plan, it might just be the only business plan for the new economy. I found the book interesting, but ultimately disappointing. All of the models that are in practice or ones he proposes rest upon analogy to the old Gillette razor blade model: give away the razor and sell the blades. The perhaps most successful modern example is giving away search services and browsers and email services all supported by ad placement (Google). Perhaps less successful universally, but certainly working for some, are those bands who give away songs and albums, hoping it leads to concert visits where fans will not just buy tickets but also t-shirts and other paraphernalia.
Giving away stuff is a nice idea, and in the field of science, particularly computational science, we have lots of examples, like free operating systems, free technical software, and free databases. But in reality they’re not truly free.
The problem ultimately is that money needs to be made somewhere; people got to eat and put a roof over their heads and get clothes and that requires real cash. So virtually all of the people developing the computational tools are being paid in some other way – say off of an NSF grant, or by the university or by their commercial employer. Or one produces some code in the hope that it attracts attention that can lead to real paying employment; one might think of this as “reputation payment” that might sometime soon be cashed in for real currency!
Now some stuff, and that can include valuable stuff, is produced truly for free. A great example are the thousands of people who contribute to Wikipedia in their free time. Those chemists who have volunteered to clean up wikipedia entries have done a great job (like this one on the recently infamous PETN) and they not only don’t get paid, they largely contribute anonymously – so they don’t even get a “reputation payment”. The same goes for the many contributors to ChemSpider. But this work is done piecemeal and infrequently and must by definition be a personal low priority because of the need to do work that puts cash in hand.
So, that leads me to ask the question “why Blog? especially why blog in chemistry?” Not an easy one to really figure out, because unless one is just doing it on a lark or very infrequently, the time necessary to blog in a serious way is quite an investment. One has to figure out how to make the blog pay off in some way. Given that our community has not adopted blogging as a means for publishing original research, though Henry Rzepa is attempting to push on this course of action (see his blog), blogging must serve some other purpose, and one that can either directly pay cash or directly raise one’s reputation.
So I’ll answer the question for myself. I blog not for altruistic reasons. While I hope that the blog provides solid information and leads people to interesting articles, that’s not why I do it. Rather the blog serves to meet two goals, both directly related to potential cash. First, the blog is an ongoing update of my monograph Computational Organic Chemistry and so the blog serves as both a way to make the book more valuable to its owners and as a great advertisement for the book – hopefully leading to continuing new sales (like right here!). Second, the systematic blogging builds up materials for a new edition of the book that I hope to begin serious work on in 2011. These blog posts will certainly help reduce the time I anticipate needing to invest in the revisions. I hope the next edition can be as successful as the first has been so far.
So, I’d really like to encourage more people to be creative about making chemical blogs viable. I enjoy many of my colleagues’ blogs, and I wish they would blog more often and that others would also step into the breach. I moved the blog and the book website off of the university campus not just to take advantage of the services that the web host provides (like back-up and 24/7 availability, etc.), but to allow for the possibility of making the sites more commercial – like by including fixed ads or Google ads. I haven’t done this because the blog is really self-sustaining right now, but this route might be a way for more people to think about starting their own blogs.
And I’d like to see more serious scientific blogging that acts to push the boundaries of how we can use this technology to enhance our scientific communication. Remember, we are the chemistry community and if enough of us make this technology our own, others will have to take it seriously and adopt new communication modes. Otherwise, we are stuck kowtowing to the whims and fears of publishers and scientists afraid of the new.
Henry Rzepa responded on 11 Jan 2010 at 2:17 pm #
A simple question posed by Steve, “why should (chemists) blog”? I suspect the reasons are remarkably varied, and many may well turn out to be either false or unsustainable. With this caveat, I might just list a few that spring to my mind.
1. I really do think that the conventional peer review process is broken in many cases, and its not obvious that the publishers (who are now largely the custodians of this process) know how to fix it. I was berated today by one frustrated editor who, upon learning that I would not be able to referee an article for him, lamented that I had not instead offered him the names of any colleagues who would do the job instead. Who would be an editor!
2. It is currently publishers who set the agendas for the future of (scientific) publishing, and this they do purely on commercial grounds. The openaccess (OA) model is something that they did not initiate, but which some have now hijacked, again for their own purposes. Steve alludes to this in his comment.
3. Could blogs be at least a partial substitute (addendum) for conferences? We all love going to the things, travelling to far flung or exotic parts of the world, often to meet all our friends and colleagues who have also turned up there (I have a standing joke with “T”, who I only ever meet a (very) long way from London, but who actually has an office about 50 miles away). And quite often, there is that unexpected meeting which leads to new science (but I also find this happens when our fire alarm here in London evicts me from my office, and I get to chat to unexpected colleagues). Who knows however if all this travel (accompanied by ever increasing security queues, checks and invasions of personal privacies) is sustainable into the future! Let me put it this way; Steve’s blog has recently catalysed two chemical ideas in my mind, both of which have led to greater things, and perhaps more are on the way. It has been at least as effective as some conferences I have attended!
4. I have been teaching now for around 33 years. During that time I have been asked a fascinating variety of questions by students (both under and postgraduate). When the Web first came around for me in 1993, I started to record my attempts at answers there, often with the help of a few calculations. Nowadays, its the blog (and occasionally Wikipedia). Much of this wisdom (if that is what it is) has no natural home that outlasts its creator, or receives dissemination beyond the group of 8-16 students I tutor as part of my job. Some people of course, distill their observations into a book, as Steve has (but lets face it, there is only a fixed number of books on computational chemistry that can be published; what do the rest of us do?). Some write articles for the Journal of Chemical Education. Others have large groups who spread out into world as Professors in the own right to seed the future (the chair of my department often introduces visiting speakers by tracing their chemical heritage all the way to Berzelius or other past luminaries). But I still fancy that a lot of good insight and considered thought into chemistry does not get passed on to the next generation (and perhaps that IS a good thing, let them all work it out for themselves!)
I think the list could/should be much longer. But I doubt many people, once they realized that my reply to Steve’s post was as long as his was, have made it this far 🙂
Jan Jensen responded on 11 Jan 2010 at 2:51 pm #
An interesting post on an important question. I completely agree with you in that more chemistry blogs would be most welcome.
Here is my 2 cents, in hope that it will inspire others to do liekwise, on why I started a blog. I had created several tutorials spread over various folders and various servers and I wanted some way to organize them. That is, I wanted some central repository I could search, and where each tutorial could be labeled by keywords. That way I can find it again.
This is exactly what services like wordpress and blogspot provide, with easy-to-use templates. It is much, much easier to set up and looks much, much better than anything I can do with my limited html skills.
In blogspot, and possibly in wordpress, I have the option of not sharing these posts, so why share them with the world?
Occasionally, I get some very useful feedback on some of the posts, but even more fundamentally: why not share it with the world? It’s no extra work, except that it forces me to write more precisely, which is not a bad thing. I don’t see how sharing it hurts me. In fact, many blog posts have helped me, so why shouldn’t I contribute. (It’s the same reason I act as a reviewer for grants and papers).
On a more philosophical note: we in academia are professors in the literal sense. We get payed to profess, i.e. generate and disseminate knowledge. If a blog seems like an unorthodox way of doing this, it may help to remember that a pdf and ppt files was viewed with similar suspicion not too long ago.
Jan Jensen responded on 11 Jan 2010 at 3:13 pm #
PS. Two more thoughts on reading Henry’s comment and re-reading Steve’s post:
“Some people of course, distill their observations into a book … Some write articles for the Journal of Chemical Education”
Yes, but you can’t (yet) publish (in the traditional sense) a Jmol animation or a screencast. In my upcoming book I expend a few trees trying to explain periodic boundary conditions, when all I really need to do is show a 30 second movie of an MD simulation. For most books and many journal articles only a small fraction of the figures can even be published in color! In 2010!
“All of the models that are in practice or ones he proposes rest upon analogy to the old Gillette razor blade model: give away the razor and sell the blades.”
Yes, but software I fundamentally different in that even I know how to distribute a virtually unlimited number of copies of software without any $ investment (step 1: get an account of sourceforge, step 2: that’s it). Not so with razors.
Mat Todd responded on 11 Jan 2010 at 4:43 pm #
An interesting, honest post with good comments.
Blogging works, in the sense that real science can be done, and will only become more effective as it scales. I help run an open source chem project at the Synaptic Leap where we are asking people for help in finding an enatioselective synthesis of a drug for a very low price. Why do we expect people to help us when we have never met, nor may ever meet, these people? I’d appeal to the Gift Relationship – blood donated is of a higher quality than blood solicited. If we’re asking why blog (and by extension why participate by replying on blogs) we must appeal to that most central feature of scientists – we can’t help ourselves. You know if you post something interesting/challenging people will respond. Yes it’s time-consuming, and yes it’s funded by stealth by other means (thank you, University of Sydney). An excellent model.
Henry Rzepa responded on 13 Jan 2010 at 7:55 am #
Jan Jensen wrote in his second comment “Yes, but you can’t (yet) publish (in the traditional sense) a Jmol animation or a screencast”. Wrong!
I have since 2005 published exactly that in the ACS (most of their journals), Nature Chemistry, several RSC journals, and (about to appear) Science. One major journal only defies this, and I am working very hard indeed on breaking them down too! Indeed, even the veritable J. Chem Ed. has three articles of ours which feature Jmol. I have even blogged on the topic, where you can find a more complete history of the genre
Trust me, if you ask, you might be rewarded!
Henry Rzepa responded on 15 Jan 2010 at 9:24 am #
I came across this post which adds to our debate. In there, Peter Murray-Rust is quoted as saying “I tend to work out my half-baked ideas in public” and the poster then goes on to speculate that “academics may spend as much time on blog posts as they do on an academic paper”. I suspect only someone who has not sweated over academic papers could write that last. I have direct experience, having twice written a series of blog posts, and then an academic article condensing those posts. From that, by far the most time consuming and challenging is the article, not the blogs!
I will bet that Steve will saying writing his blog is easier than his book. Am I right or wrong Steve?
The article quoted above is interesting for other reasons as well.
Steven Bachrach responded on 15 Jan 2010 at 9:41 am #
I can attest to a very different amount of time writing a blog and writing an article – the latter is much more time intensive. But that’s not to say that writing blog posts is trivial; I can spend upwards of 3 hours on a particularly complex post.
And the book is a very different beast altogether. The critical aspect there is to place each piece into a proper context and explain all the pieces in as coherent a fashion as possible.