The Internet and science communication: blurring the boundaries

Scientific research is heavily dependent on communication and collaboration. Research does not exist in a bubble; scientific work must be communicated in order to add it to the body of knowledge within a scientific community, so that its members may 'stand on the shoulders of giants' and benefit from all that has come before. The effectiveness of scientific communication is crucial to the pace of scientific progress: in all its forms it enables ideas to be formulated, results to be compared, and replications and improvements to be made. The sharing of science is a foundational aspect of the scientific method. This paper, part of the policy research within the FP7 EUROCANCERCOMS project, discusses how the Internet has changed communication by cancer researchers and how it has the potential to change it still more in the future. It will detail two broad types of communication: formal and informal, and how these are changing with the use of new web tools and technologies.