The Register reports this morning on a panel concerning the application of Web 2.0 and semantic technologies to science publishing. The issue at stake is that scientists appear to have rejected these new approaches.

The session New Webtech and Science Publishing: (Re)Constructing the Scientific Article featured Matt Cockerill from BioMed Central, Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute, Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing Group and Amit Kapoor, Topaz/PLoS One. It is also reported on here.

Ultimately, it seems that scientists are measured by the appearance of their work in scholarly journals, and the citation count of references to those articles in other papers. This is a painfully slow process and Matt Cockerill suggested that a Digg-style voting system for papers could work as a way of improving the speed with which new and important research is recognised by the community. He also maintained that a wiki contributed to by an open group of scientists would allow them to go some way towards catching up on the annotation of protein sequences in the Swiss-Prot database.

Similar issues regarding the measurement of scientific achievement apparently make it unlikely for scientists to blog or to comment on others' blog posts. The same issues apply to the tools used to assist scientists. The tools need to prove their worth before they're adopted. But they never get chance to prove their worth because they aren't adopted.