And in turn, you have inspired me to do something similar. I read (to varying degrees of attentiveness) many, many papers per week, but I never write about them other than to take notes, write questions to the authors etc.
For the next 52 weeks, I'm gonna try to write a layman's explanation (with some amount of appropriate background) about a paper every week. I suspect these will center around my work, but I also suspect the act of thinking about the kind of stuff I do in a more general sense will be a valuable learning experience, and who knows, maybe someone else will learn something too!
Alex! It's awesome that you've decided to do this and you have my support! I'm replying to you because I want to pitch you something: I'm running a free open platform for simplified summaries of scientific papers: http://www.sciencegist.com
If you decide to contribute these layman's explanations to Science Gist, I can guarantee you will earn yourself at least one user of the day award :P
Fixed. Sorry! I had a recent bout with spammers :/ You can add a gist anonymously if you don't like to expose yourself, but having that functionality is quite dangerous online, for obvious reasons. I don't like captchas, but I'll have to add them soon (for anonymous contributions) if this continues.
A researcher in my field did this (not 52 weeks unfortunately). He basically made his blog into a giant review article [1]. He was a celebrity at the biophysical society conference last year because of all the students that discovered his blog on Google while looking for papers.
As somebody who is about to start grad school, blogging about papers publicly sounds like an excellent idea.
At the beginning of my Master's degree, I was quite careful about making notes about every paper I read, but as I gained more background and started focussing on doing on my own work, I'd read papers only enough to get what I needed out of them (fortunately I have a good enough memory that when I needed something I'd already read about, I could often find the paper -- and I was religious about at least saving all the papers I read). Doing it publicly might keep the motivation up.
> As somebody who is about to start grad school, blogging about papers publicly sounds like an excellent idea.
Eh, maybe. Publicly criticizing the work of others in an informal venue where you don't have the benefit of editing/peer review could potentially make you look foolish while also alienating potential future collaborators/colleagues/reviewers.
First up is
"High-resolution reversible folding of hyperstable RNA tetraloops using molecular dynamics simulations" Chen & Garcia (September 16, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1309392110 PNAS September 16, 2013) which is a bit of a cheat because I'm teaching it next week, and I know Alan.
The following week will be;
"Oral Treatment Targeting the Unfolded Protein Response Prevents Neurodegeneration and Clinical Disease in Prion-Infected Mice" Moreno et al (Sci Transl Med 9 October 2013: Vol. 5, Issue 206, p. 206ra138
And after that something from Don Cleverland (UCSF)'s lab, as I saw him speak not that long ago and he blew my mind.
That being said, I'd also (probably) take requests!
Why don't you make it a business model and monetize laymanizing/summarizing papers by request? Just thinking, you could, you don't need to. If you consider that, you could invite colleagues to do the same on a distributed platform/blog. So that every new scientist can just connect and add value, without getting vendor-locked. Who knows, maybe there is a market for selling the results of "peer-review" ;)
You know what? I wish that you get rich with that! Everbody would benefit from more openness in Science. I hate that many many publishers squeeze scientists out like parasitic worms and also cash on us and other scientist who just want to read the paper. They rip us off in the range of $5-$300 per paper and do that with mostly keeping 100% of the profit.
Their industry damaging business model: A←parasite-publisher→B
Breaking Bad: With an open business model: A←→B←→C←→D …
There could be potential in that idea. Ff it were a few more people and every one covering one specific area with one new paper each week presented, it could make an really interesting grad student brain incubator. I would definitely join in if there were a bit coordination.
For the next 52 weeks, I'm gonna try to write a layman's explanation (with some amount of appropriate background) about a paper every week. I suspect these will center around my work, but I also suspect the act of thinking about the kind of stuff I do in a more general sense will be a valuable learning experience, and who knows, maybe someone else will learn something too!