About a month ago, Karen of The Beagle Project published a nifty paper in PLoS ONE. Now she wrote a blog post with the background story, the 'tacit knowledge' that usually does not appear in peer-reviewed literature but is essential for the workings of science - the kind of stuff that is transferred vertically from advisors to students, or horizontally between researchers at conferences.
It is important at this day and age for this tacit knowledge to become public. By hogging it, researchers in big institutions in developed countries hamper the development of scientists in small places and in the developing countries. I wish more scientists wrote blog posts describing the back-story of their research (as I did for my old work before), then posted links to the posts from the papers themselves so people can come, read and learn.
Aw, shucks, Bora. *blushes*
Not only that, but she does quite well on radio interviews.
I mentioned her blog post before I had gotten a chance to read it thoroughly and Karen very gently corrected me on my mistake.
Yup. We're lucky to have her. Don't tell her, eh?