The microblogging platform Twitter has been growing in areas one would not imagine. In Science it has been used by researchers to share interesting papers. I do that myself in my own Twitter (@licinio). As soon as newsworthy papers come up in the journals I edit: Molecular Psychiatry, Translational Psychiatry and The Pharmacogenomics Journal - or in any other journal that I come across - I tweet the topic of the paper and the link to my followers. Other researchers also share interesting papers this way.However, the use of Tweeter has gotten much deeper in science and has literally brought us back to the origins of scientific communication. People are now tweeting their own data or comments on papers. Moreover, there is now a movement to do journal clubs via Tweeter. Click HERE for the Nature blog that describes this emerging phenomenon. As they state in that blog "Simon Schaffer, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, says that Twitter is not as different from traditional scientific communication as it may seem. Journals began as letters between scientists, and were only later collated and published." This way, what appears to be avant-garde is in close examination a retrograde move back to our origins. Tweeter is bringing us to the starting point of scientific communication: it all began as tweet-equivalents anyway.
