Adam Bly of SEED Media just concluded his keynote address at the SSP’s Annual Meeting. His main themes were that cross-disciplinary science is vital to progress; that science and culture must combine to be effective agents of change; that scholarly societies, publishers, and traditions shouldn’t be impediments to the free flow of information; and that the culture of “do it yourself” (DIY) in science means scientists won’t wait for us to solve these problems.

Adam went over some statistics from the SEED “State of Science” report:

• to the cross-disciplinary aspect of science, Adam noted that 65% of scientists cite literature as having an influence on their science
• 62% of scientists are involved in collaboration
• 77% say peer-review matters to progress

But in an information space creating 15 petabytes of new information per day and with 31 billion searches in Google every month, STM publishing needs to change in key ways:

• a digital core, not just digital accessories
• common standards that accelerate crowd-sourced innovation
• promote the free flow of information
• move to advance interdisciplinary science
• connect the developed and developing world
• extract knowledge of information
• unite scientists with each other and with resources
• collaborate with the audience (they aren’t “our readers”)

Adam also announced the release of ResearchBlogging.org to the general community. This is a way to tie together blog posts about scientific papers. Their first adopters are PLoS One and the Royal Society. They can also link to arXiv.org and PubMed, and are working with CrossRef to synthesize article identification and aggregation.

Adam finally announced the launch of an “Information Science” channel on ScienceBlogs, for librarians, publishers, and others in the information sphere. He also noted that ScienceBlogs now has 2.2 million monthly unique visitors.

It was a good way to kick off the meeting. Off to the next sessions.