broadening the scientific conversation

There are some interesting advances in how some journals and online media are broadening the scientific conversation — here are a few of my favorite examples:

• I absolutely love the format that the über-cross-disciplinary journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences uses by inviting a dozen+ responses to articles —- here’s a fantastic example: Henrich et al., “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28.  So, in total the article is 62 pages long, but see the brilliant (and wildly cross-disciplinary) discussion and exchange that ensues on pages 21-62.
• Seed Magazine is doing some great things to foster dialogue online and in print.
• The time has come —- open access to journals! Surely there is a sensible model to make it work.
• contexts.
• iTunesU is a daily must.
• ePrint archives obviously are huge (SSRN, arXiv, etc).
• The Economist’s Voice is interesting, and the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) more generally seems to be aggressively growing (up to some 39 journals now) and relevant.  BEPRESS was only started ten years ago.
• Some journals, like the Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy, are podcasting. I briefly listened to one of their short podcasts — essentially the podcast covered the latest journal issue, the main findings of each piece and featured some additional discussion.  (Here’s the podcast site for the Journal of Law, Economics and Policy.)
• The journals Nature and Science do a great job of packaging things online and also allowing for various formats.

OK, so, most folks in academia are probably familiar with the above.  But, it’ll be interesting to see how “scientific conversation” evolves more generally, and how organization theory-related journals adapt and innovate given some of the above.