The Open Laboratory: Interview with Bora Zivkovic

Blogs are being used more and more frequently as a platform to describe, discuss and debate scientific research. Indeed, an editorial in the journal Nature earlier this year questioned if blogging is a part of science, journalism or public discourse, and suggested that it may in fact be all three [1]. Whether it be communication among scientists or communicating science to the public, science blogs are quickly becoming authoritative online sources of scientific topics for the general public. As a scientist participating in this medium, I can tell you that the science blogosphere is growing rapidly. Every day, it seems there are more scientists blogging about scientific research and posting their thoughts, ideas and opinions online.

Science journalism is changing. Web 2.0 technologies — blogs, wikis, social networks, mircoblogging — are changing the way scientific information is presented and disseminated. Can science blogs written by actual scientists do a better job at communicating science than journalists and the mainstream media? Many think so. But how do science blogs reach the general public, especially those people who may not be aware of or actively reading them?

The Open Laboratory is a printed annual anthology of science blogging managed by series editor Bora Zivkovic. The Open Laboratory is an attempt to showcase the best writing on science blogs to an audience not yet familiar with the science blogosphere.

I talked with Bora recently and find out more about the Open Laboratory, his thoughts on science blogs and science journalism and, as PLoS Online Discussion Expert, the tools he uses to promote public engagement in science.

The Interview

Can you explain what the Open Laboratory is and how you came up with the idea?

Three years ago, as we were preparing the first Science Blogging Conference, my friend and colleague Anton Zuiker (Twitter: @mistersugar) was talking to a number of potential sponsors for the meeting. One of those sponsors was Lulu.com, local print-on-demand book publisher. The Lulu.com representative suggested that one way they could support the conference would be to publish an anthology of some of the best blog posts written by science bloggers. Having only about four weeks left before the conference, Anton thought this was not sufficient time to produce such a book, especially as the winter holidays were coming, so he negotiated a different kind of sponsorship deal with Lulu.com. But he mentioned the idea to me over coffee one day soon after and my response was something along the lines of “Impossible? Watch me!”

So, I went online, posted a call for submissions on my blog and e-mailed hundreds of science bloggers asking them to recommend either their own or other people’s best posts ever. That was in late December 2006. Soon, the entries started coming in. I asked several friends in the science blogging world to help me read and evaluate all the entries (yes, over Christmas!). Once they were done, I collated their ‘grades’. This narrowed the field from 218 submissions down to 62. Out of those finalists, I picked 50 essays and one poem by eliminating some of the double posts by the same authors, and making sure that different areas of science, as well as different formats and styles, were represented in the final version. I contacted the authors, got their permission to inlude their work in the book, and, with huge help from Anton Zuiker on the technical side of things, put the book together and had it published by Lulu.com just in time for the first Conference.

The book was an instant success — the authors proudly displayed their “Open Lab 06 Author” buttons on their blogs and bought additional copies to give to their family and friends. The word spread and hundreds of bloggers linked to the book. It was reviewed, quite positively, by several outlets, including Nature. There was no question in my mind that this would have to become an annual event, resulting in a series of “best of year” anthologies.

How is an editor for each edition of the Open Laboratory chosen?

Capriciously! No, seriously, I put a lot of thought into picking a Guest Editor each year. After I did the first anthology by myself, in four weeks, I realized that this was a job that is too big for just one person. I also anticipated that the popularity of the first book would result in an even larger number of submissions the following year (true — we received 468 entries in 2007), especially as I put the call for submissions much earlier in the year. Managing this job required more than one person.

For the 2007 anthology, I picked Reed Cartwright for several reasons. He has just moved to the Triangle area of North Carolina a few months before and at that point I thought that I would need to work with the Guest Editor closely. Which we did — we met a number of times during the year and released the book in time for the second Science Blogging Conference. Reed has a great eye for design and amazing technical savvy. He put in place all the necessary technical tools (I did everything by hand the first year) needed for gathering submissions, judging the entries, putting the book together and publishing it. He assembled a large and diverse team of judges. He also made the book look beautiful! Having Reed on board was a quantum leap in the production of the book, and the tools he made are here to be used over and over each year. It was also a great pleasure to work closely with him for the year. The second anthology, containing 52 essays, one poem and one cartoon, also received positive reviews in the press, including, again, in Nature.

For the 2008 edition, I needed to go a step further. In the first two books, the editing, proof-reading and copy-editing of entries was done mostly by authors of the pieces themselves. As much as I (and the next year Reed and I) tried to proofread them all, the short time-frame and our lack of such experience resulted in some typos getting through, and some entries feeling a little rough around the edges. At that point I knew that the Guest Editor need not live in my neighborhood and that the work could be done remotely. I also realized that the publication of the book did not necessarily have to coincide with the third Conference (ScienceOnline’09), so I decided that I would rather go for quality than for speed. I needed a real-life editor for this. And I had an obvious choice staring me in the face — Jennifer Rohn, the editor of LabLit magazine and the author of the brilliant Experimental Heart. We have never met in person, but we knew each other well from the online world. She assembled a professional team: Richard Grant as Assistant Editor and Maria Brumm as Technical Editor, as well as a great group of external reviewers who sifted through 830 submitted entries. Re-design of the cover was done by David Ng using art produced by Glendon Mellow. As you can see, this has become a Big Project now, quite professional. And this approach paid off: the 2008 edition is beautiful, all the pieces are nicely edited and the execution was perfect! This is now a book that in all aspects, from content to design to production, matches anything done by Big Publishers. Jennifer turned an amateur project into a serious business with a serious product that has to be taken seriously by the book industry as well as by blog-watchers — another quantum leap for us. This makes me very happy.

And why I picked SciCurious to be the Guest Editor for next year? You will have to ask me once the Open Laboratory 2009 is published. It’s a secret!

How are the essays selected for each anthology? What criteria are used in the selection process?

The blog posts are submitted via an online submission form. The Guest Editor and I have the access to the complete list, but I regularly post it on my blog as well (A Blog Around the Clock category: OpenLab09) to remind people to submit and to avoid getting too many duplicates. I estimate that about half of the entries are submitted by the authors (nobody knows your archives as well as you do!) and the other half by readers. We are asking for entries in all areas of science and in all formats: essays, stories, poems, comic-strips, cartoons, original art, etc. We also remind them to think about paper: the entries have to be easily transformed from the online to the offline medium — a post that heavily relies on a video, for instance, would not work in print. The posts also need to be able to stand on their own even if the videos, podcasts, images and most links are removed.

When December starts looming closer, the Guest Editor chooses and contacts a group of people to serve as judges. These are usually science bloggers with specialty in different areas of science. The group usually also contains a non-blogging scientist and a non-science blogger. The judges are instructed to look primarily for the quality of writing (or art). Readers of science blogs tend to be themselves scientists or science-savvy lay audience. The readers of the book are likely to also be less science-educated (e.g. the authors’ Moms), thus posts that are heavily technical or require quite a lot of prior expertise are not what the judges are looking for. The ability to modify a post from an online environment to paper is one of the key requirements.

Once the panel of judges has turned in their grades and commentary, the Guest Editor looks at the top finalists and makes some adjustments, picking the posts in a way that, in addition to each entrya’s high quality of writing, also provides for a diversity of topics, formats, styles and voices. A purely mathematical algorithm would not work here, as the book would probably contain a number of posts critiquing Creationists (a popular topic) and miss some real gems in other topics.

In April, Michael Le Page at New Scientist reviewed the 2008 edition of the Open Laboratory, saying that there are “too many mini-lectures, with no narrative or personal angle to sustain your attention.” What are your thoughts?

As you may be aware, of all the popular science magazines on the planet The New Scientist suffers the worst reputation among science experts online, including on science blogs. This is not just due to a number of eggregiously sensationalist titles and covers, and some scientifically inaccurate articles, but mostly for a complete lack of humility in the face of criticism, or any signs that they may take criticism seriously and try to do better in the future. Thus, this little article was never meant to be a review of the book — it was designed as another salvo they throw at the bloggers (carefully framed to ‘damn with faint praise’), thus demonstrating yet again that they do not grok the new publishing ecosystem, or even how Google works.

As for the quote “too many mini-lectures, with no narrative or personal angle to sustain your attention” this just demonstrates that he never actually read the book (which contains a number of pieces with a narrative or personal angle) — did not need to, as he never intended to review it in the first place. See the discussions about this at Laelaps, Neurotopia and Science After Sunclipse. The funniest part is that Le Page invoked the reputation of Weblogs Awards, the notorious tool of the rightwingnuttosphere, which are generally boycotted by the reality-based community. Epic FAIL in understanding the Web.

Of course, their lack of understanding of the Web, leading to the publication of this non-review, can only backfire on them — they slid another notch down in everyone’s eyes for using such slimy tactics AND the sales of all three anthologies saw a spike during the several days following the article’s publication. Perhaps one day they’ll learn …

In your “day job”, are also the the Online Discussion Expert for the Public Library of Science (PLoS). In that capacity, what other online tools do you use to promote public engagement in science?

At PLoS we engage in a two-way communication with our community in a variety of online outlets, including the PLoS Blog, the everyONE blog, our @PLoS Twitter account, the PLoS ONE room on FriendFeed and our PLoS Facebook page. Several PLoS editors and staffers, including myself, also engage our community individually on these and other social networks. We are one of the co-organizers of the annual Open Access Day, we travel and speak at conferences, several of us write our own personal blogs, and we regularly read other science blogs and comment on them. The scientific paper is just the beginning of the conversation — our commenting and rating tools are the first layer of connection between the paper and the outside world, while trackbacks and other connections to the blogging world are the outer layer.

One last question: where do you see science blogs in the evolving world of science journalism in five years?

Blog is software. Anyone can use it. Including journalists. As the cost of printing stuff on paper forces journalism, including science journalism, to move online, we will see more and more science journalists, and even entire magazines, quit printing on paper and start publishing their stuff online, on some kind of bloggy software. Online, reputation is built with quality. Some journalists will do well once their success is determined by readers instead of employers. A number of them have already been blogging for years and have earned their online reputation (e.g. Olivia Judson, Carl Zimmer, Rebecca Skloot, Chris Mooney, David Dobbs, Tom Levenson and others). Many will fail.

Likewise for blogging scientists and science journalistic amateurs. They are experts in their fields and many are excellent writers. Some will earn much greater reputation for integrity, expertise and joy of reading their work than any journalists — their real-life scientific expertise is a big advantage (it is much easier to learn to write well and absorb a few journalistic “rules” than to learn the nuance of science). Many will fail as well. The entire bloggers vs. journalists dichotomy is thus false. In the future for sure, and already in the present to a great extent, everyone is a blogger (in the sense of necessity of writing online), everyone is equal, and everyone is evaluated by an increasingly savvy online audience. The definition of the word “journalist” will change as not to mean “someone who gets paid to write by a media organization”. In the world in which everyone is a journalist, only a few will get paid directly for their writing. For most, their writing is their PR — a way to get noticed and a way to get other, paying opportunities and jobs.

Thank you for your time.

Bora Zivkovic blogs at A Blog Around the Clock. You can also follow him on Twitter @BoraZ and on FriendFeed.

You can use the Open Laboratory submission form to add posts you and/or others have written, including original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays. Help to spread the word by embedding these buttons on your blogs and websites.

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References

1. It’s good to blog. Nature. 2009 Feb 26;457(7233):1058.
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