For the first time in quite a while, a scientific paper is getting lots of ink just for being cool - and it’s not attempting to debunk medical dogma, attacking cherished religious beliefs, or drumming up any scandal at all. As far as I can tell, everyone just thinks it’s really interesting. The authors of the paper, published in PLoS Biology, used functional and structural MRI to construct a map of connections between areas of human cortex. If you’re like me, this sounds pretty humdrum; after all, didn’t we already know most of this? The gory details of the authors’ methods and findings are so stupendously dry that it’s actually pretty difficult to tell what the big fuss is about (and before anyone says anything, I did eventually read the whole paper…with some difficulty). But the important thing to realize is that the authors aren’t just saying, “Look, these two areas are both involved in recognizing faces. They must be part of the face-recognition-sensation-memory-integration circuit! Nifty, eh?” Instead, they’ve actually mapped structural connections between functional areas of cortex. Now they can say, “Look, we know that areas A and B are both involved in recognizing faces; that’s not news. We’ve taken this a big step further and shown that A and B are physically connected via C, D, E, and F in the following circuits: blahdey-blahdey-blah. In fact, we’ve shown that the ABCDEF network is probably the brain’s central integrating network and we’ve mapped all its most important connections.” This type of map should permit the kind of mathematical modelling that’s common in computer science and AI applications.
I’m geeky enough to think that this is really sweet. But it’s great that the New York Times agrees - it’s rare that a paper with so few immediate practical applications and so little attached scandal gets much ink. Granted, the NYT Science section is not exactly the cover of USA Today, but this paper even made Metafilter’s top posts of the day. Oddly enough, though, the NYT article didn’t touch on the authors’ decision to publish in PLoS Biology rather than a more traditional, big-name journal (like one of the Nature group’s journals). PLoS is open-access and publishes everything under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which basically means that readers can do whatever they want with the work as long as they credit the original authors. This is quite unusual in scientific publishing, where the usual model is to charge ludicrously high fees for read-only access. This article’s publication also comes on the heels of Nature’s criticism of PLoS’s publication model and the flurry of discussion it prompted online. As a strong supporter of open science and free (as in speech, not as in beer) journals, I think it’s great that the authors chose to publish in a manner that supports perpetual, free access to research funded with public monies.
