---
title: "Science 2.0"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_2.0"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:50:15.406926+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Before the Internet, scientific publishing has been described as a "highly integrated and controlled process." Research was done in private. Next, it was submitted to scientific publications and reviewed by editors and gatekeepers and other scientists. Last, it was published. This has been the traditional pathway of scientific advancement, sometimes dubbed Science 1.0.
Established journals provided a "critical service", according to one view. Publications such as Science and Nature have large editorial staffs to manage the peer-review process as well as have hired fact-checkers and screeners to look over submissions. These publications get revenue from subscriptions, including online ones, as well as advertising revenue and fees paid by authors. According to advocates of Science 2.0, however, this process of paper-submission and review was rather long. Detractors complained that the system is "hidebound, expensive and elitist", sometimes "reductionist", as well as being slow and "prohibitively costly". Only a select group of gatekeepers—those in charge of the traditional publications—limited the flow of information. Proponents of open science claimed that scientists could learn more and learn faster if there is a "friction-free collaboration over the Internet."
Yet there is considerable resistance within the scientific community to a change of approach. The act of publishing a new finding in a major journal has been at the "heart of the career of scientists," according to one view, which elaborated that many scientists would be reluctant to sacrifice the "emotional reward" of having their discoveries published in the usual, traditional way. Established scientists are often loath to switch to an open-source model, according to one view.
Timo Hannay explained that the traditional publish-a-paper model, sometimes described as "Science 1.0", was a workable one but there need to be other ways for scientists to make contributions and get credit for their work:

The unit of contribution to the scientific knowledge base has become the paper. Journals grew up as a means for scientists to be able to share their discoveries and ideas. The incentive for doing so was that by publishing in journals their contributions would be recognized by citation and other means. So you have this pact: be open with your ideas and share them through journals and you will get credit... There are all kinds of ways in which scientists can contribute to the global endeavor. ... The incentive structure has not caught up with what we really want scientists to do.
In 2008, a scientist at the University of Maryland named Ben Shneiderman wrote an editorial entitled Science 2.0. Shneiderman argued that Science 2.0 was about studying social interactions in the "real world" with study of e-commerce, online communities and so forth. A writer in Wired Magazine criticized Shneiderman's view, suggesting that Shneiderman's call for more collaboration, more real-world tests, and more progress should not be called "Science 2.0" or "Science 1.0" but simply science.
There are reports that established journals are moving towards greater openness. Some help readers network online; others enable commenters to post links to websites; others make papers accessible after a certain period of time has elapsed. But it remains a "hotly debated question", according to one view, whether the business of scientific research can move away from the model of "peer-vetted, high-quality content without requiring payment for access." The topic has been discussed in a lecture series at the California Institute of Technology. Proponent Adam Bly thinks that the key elements needed to transform Science 2.0 are "vision" and "infrastructure":

Open science is not this maverick idea; it's becoming reality. About 35 percent of scientists are using things like blogs to consume and produce content. There is an explosion of online tools and platforms available to scientists, ranging from Web 2.0 tools modified or created for the scientific world to Web sites that are doing amazing things with video, lab notebooks, and social networking. There are thousands of scientific software programs freely available online and tens of millions of science, technology, and math journal articles online. What's missing is the vision and infrastructure to bring together all of the various changes and new players across this Science 2.0 landscape so that it's simple, scalable, and sustainable—so that it makes research better.

== Proliferation on the web ==

There are numerous examples of more websites offering opportunities for scientific collaboration.