This is the title of Declan Butler’s article that has been published in “nature” some days ago. He discusses social software and especially the “social” visualization tools Swivel and Many eyes (see blogstats post 05-03-2007).
Two interesting statements in this article:
“If research organizations and journals linked the raw data behind papers to social software tools such as Swivel and Many Eyes, he (Brent Edwards, director of the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California) argues, “it would have considerable value to the scientific community as a whole””. And: ” …the collective intelligence and expertise of users will result in new insights (Fernanda Viégas of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts)”.
See the full article here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7131/full/446010b.html
Or try the permanent link, go to http://doi.org/ and put the number of the article in the text box. The number is: 10.1038/446010b. Archiving and permanent links are another topic to look at later on!
Blog about Stats 
OECD has been doing something like this for the past couple of years. In our publications and papers we offer links to the underlying datasets (in Excel) so that users don’t have to re-key data from tables in printed publications and e-books, or get frustrated that they can’t see the data behind charts and graphs. We called these links ‘StatLinks’ and we use DOIs. The link is printed under each chart, graph and table which the user can use to obtain the Excel file. Last year, we delivered over 600,000 StatLink files from around 24 books – so clearly we’ve done something that’s popular with readers. We’re working to extend the StatLink service to all our books, but the work involved is not insignificant. In the future we plan to add ongoing links from each Excel file to the original database. Linking to objects on Swivel or elsewhere would also be a snap to do.
Statistics Sweden has also made an approach in this direction – based on the OECD Factbook. It is a Powerpoint application where graphics are marked in a way that makes it possible to identify Sweden. Se link to file (6 MB), hope it will become live:
http://www.scb.se/Grupp/Kurser/_Dokument/OECDfacts2006.ppt
Great post. Hope to see more excellent posts in the future.