"On February 2-5 2008 sprinters gathered in Davis, California to improve Plone's ability to support scientific collaboration. We made some excellent progress and had a great time in the process."

Complete Story

This is very cool, HarvardScience has chosen Drupal for their CMS.  I'm looking at Drupal for a science oriented server on the Intranet side.  Hmmm...ideas from Harvard...

Choosing a CMS

During the six months before I began building the HarvardScience site, the Harvard News Office had been working with designer Claudio luís Vera of Studio Module. The result was 28 beautiful templates, which had been chiseled, filed, and polished to the client's adoration. Unfortunately, during this time the News Office had still not made up its mind about what CMS to use. In fact there was still some muttering about how a custom CMS was the way to go.

So approximately six months ago, I built the first draft of HarvardScience using Drupal over the course of a weekend. The result was exactly what I had hoped for - the news office was so excited by the speed at which the site could be built they decided to go with Drupal. The rapid development of a prototype or draft site can be built using Drupal made the CMS issue a fait accompli strategy.

Complete Story via Drupal.org

I found this article via Creative Commons' Science Commons.  In the Financial Times article, "The irony of a web without science", James Boyle writes:

The greatest irony, though, is this. The world wide web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. In every other area of life - commerce, social networking, pornography - it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of an open web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and very little like a world wide web for science.

Having the strong science background that I do with ten years spent as a forecast meteorologist, I can't help but ponder on the article James Boyle has written.  How much research wasn't pursued further due to the fact that it never left the pages of the scientific journals and read by the masses?  Why does the research community have a difficult time publishing their work on the Web?  As long as a proper process for peer review is established for Internet publications, which it can with the proper content/collaboration management system, are scientific journals still a necessity?