Nature Magazine's Dec 1st issue has an interesting suite of articles about "Science in the web age: The expanding electronic universe".

Great insights in here about how scientists are, and will be, using online tools in their work. Two ideas that I get from the articles that I think are powerful: that scientists are and will increasingly collaborate (rather than compete) because they will make progress more quickly; and that new flavors of research products are emerging and being recognized as valuable, apart from that traditional peer-reviewed products.

The articles, and some quotes from them, include:

"Joint efforts" about collaboration in science via wikis and blog and other tools:

"If someone told me that I could show up at a lecture hall every day and deliver a short opinion, and that 1,500 people would show up to hear me, I'd be pretty satisfied — 1,500 is twice the subscription of many speciality journals", said a senior edpidemiologist blogger.

"The real death of print" about Google's and others' plans to digitize masses of print books, and voices for/against, including:

"Science is moving incredibly fast, and scanning old books is a complete waste of money."Matthias Ulmer

And "Start your engines" about Google Scholar and it increasing impact on how researcher find, (discover!), and use information:

"I follow the citation trail and get to papers I hadn't expected," says Mrsic-Flogel. "I have found papers that way that I wouldn't have found otherwise.