In an historic achievement, I can announce that I have become (to my knowledge) the first blogger ever to publish in a peer-reviewed academic journal under a blogging pseudonym.
Skeptic, N. (2012) The Nine Circles of Scientific HellPerspectives on Psychological Science 7 (6) 643-644
This is based on a post from two years ago (far and away the most popular post I've ever done).
Now as historic achievements go, this is fairly niche, but I do think it's important.
Most of the problems with the way science works today are problems of communication. We're trying to do 21st century work with a 19th century publishing model, and the cracks are showing.
Academic papers are a fine way of presenting the final results of research - they're here to stay. But scientists ought to be communicating (with each other and with the public) in many other ways as well, and I think that anything we can do to break down the hegemony of the 'final paper' - whether it be blogging, arxiv, the Open Science Framework or raw data sharing - is a step forward.
In that regard, I think it's great that the boundaries between 'real' papers and alternative forms of scientific communication have just become a little blurrier.
The piece appears in a special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science full to bursting with other papers that readers of this blog are likely to find interesting... and it's all free to access (at least for now).
Neuroskeptic (2012). The Nine Circles of Scientific Hell Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7 (6), 643-644 DOI: 10.1177/1745691612459519
