Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in “networked journalism,” in which readers-you-get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it’s my feature story on “Science 2.0,” which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0.-just post your inputs in the Comment section below. To help get you started, here are some questions to mull over:

• What do you think of the article itself? Are there errors? Oversimplifications? Gaps?
• What do you think of the notion of “Science 2.0?” Will Web 2.0 tools really make science much more productive? Will wikis, blogs and the like be transformative, or will they be just a minor convenience?
• Science 2.0 is one aspect of a broader Open Science movement, which also includes Open-Access scientific publishing and Open Data practices. How do you think this bigger movement will evolve?
• Looking at your own scientific field, how real is the suspicion and mistrust mentioned in the article? How much do you and your colleagues worry about getting “scooped”? Do you have first-hand knowledge of a case in which that has actually happened?
• When young scientists speak out on an open blog or wiki, do they risk hurting their careers?
• Is “open notebook” science always a good idea? Are there certain aspects of a project that researchers should keep quite, at least until the paper is published?

–M. Mitchell Waldrop

I don’t know how much time or energy this will leave me for blogging. Maybe a lot: after all, I’ll be traveling quite a bit, which means a lot of time on airplanes. But be assured, I will still find no shortage of things to talk about…!

In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; we’ll see more and more of that, I trust. The journalists can and should link to other work on the same story, to source material, and perhaps blog posts from the sources (see: Mark Cuban). After the story is published – online, in print, wherever – the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts, and perspective … not to mention promotion via links. I hope this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as journalists realize that they are less the manufacturers of news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news. … this isn’t about citizens or amateurs vs. professionals. We’re all in this together. Journalism is a collaborative venture. Journalism is a network.

Precisely. The critical phrase here—and the central challenge for the profession—is “moderators of conversations.” Journalists have a not-entirely-undeserved reputation for being lone wolves, while editors have a similar reputation for being autocrats and/or control freaks. Our skill sets, painfully acquired, generally include some combination of reporting, writing, editing, photography, audio and video. But moderating a conversation—with the public—strikes me as a much different, herding-cats kind of skill. How many of us are going to be willing or able to learn that skill? Or be any good at it?

That’s the reassuring part: the basics of good journalism (and good writing) in the Web era are just what they always were, only more so. But it’s also a challenge, because putting that lesson into practice is a lot easier said than done, for writers, editors and publishers alike.