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There’s an interesting article just out in Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, which “publishes substantive content of interest to science and technology librarians.”

Written by John Carey, head librarian at Hunter College, City University of New York, the article examines the concept of “invisible colleges“: mechanisms that promote dissemination of knowledge and fuel the growth of scientific specialties. Crucially, this isn’t through traditional published (journal) articles but rather between researchers directly, via “informal” channels such as blogs, twitter, Facebook and cetera.

Carey talks about VIVO, which is an “open source semantic web application,” designed to enable interaction between researchers at a given institution as well as on a wider scale. He also says some very nice things about Faculty of 1000, rather generously calling us “Peer Review 2.0” and explaining what we do very well indeed (there are, unfortunately, no anchors within the article so I can’t deep link for you).

He describes how we mesh the new, Web 2.0 way of doing things with traditional methods of scholarly communication, enabling us to expand “these once informal communications [i.e. post-publication commentary] into a powerful new venue for open science.”

Thanks John–the cheque’s in the post (no, seriously: we had nothing to do with the article. Hunter College have had a trial of F1000 and frankly, we couldn’t hope for better unsolicited feedback).