Science 3.0 is a rapidly growing online community of scientists and people with wide-ranging interests. Discussing science with the current and future tools and concepts of information is a great endeavour we are all happy to take part in! In order to increase this emulation, we decided to launch the ‘Science 3.0 Blogging Contest’.

What is the ‘Science 3.0 Blogging Contest’?

It is a window to another science landscape. It is a Guest Blog. It is all the postings you will write through the Guest Blog. Whether you are a regular blogger or not does not matter. What matters is what you write.

How about the practical details?

A topic will be given on the 15th of every month and you can write a posting on it on the Guest Blog. An editorial committee will attribute prizes based on:

• originality
• creativity
• pertinence
• readers’ appreciation

For the moment, postings in English and French will be accepted. In the near future, other languages will be added.

There will be 1 winner every month. You can enter as many posts as you like. Bookmark postings will be discarded and not considered. The maximal ranking for a posting is 5; will be considered for prize postings with ranks of 4.5 or greater.

Readers’ comments

In order to leave a comment, you do not need to be registered but this may save you time in the long run. You can also now login to Science 3.0 using your Facebook, twitter, google, openID, LinkedIn or AOL account.

Flood and spam-like comments will be removed and not considered; if more than three spamming comments are committed, the reader’s account will be deleted. Comments containing links evaluated as pertinent/complementary will be given more attention. Every month, the most interesting readers’ comments will be given prizes as well.

Every month’s contest is independent. In other words, if you win this month, it does not give you an advantage in the next one.

What if you blog on a different network?

We would like to have all the blogs for each competition in one place. However, we cannot just lift your blogs off other networks. We would need you to send us the blog post here, or alternatively set up a blog here (which we can help with).

What about the very first contest?

The Science 3.0 Blogging Contest kick-off topic will be “Open Access”. As you all know, the Open Access Week will take place from October 18 till October 24, 2010. Which is… next week! We decided that a blog contest dedicated to Open Access running during the Open Access Week is a brilliant idea. All your opinions, testimonials, cry-it-out postings on Open Access are therefore welcome throughout the Open Access Week.

For this first edition, a veritable gold mine of open access swag is up for grabs!

So, get ready and get blogging!

For more information, you can contact @mark, @malicia or @steelgraham through the site, or email @mark directly here.