Next Generation Science

• The Life Scientists at FriendFeed: 2009 summary | What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

  Neil Saunders uses R and Ruby to craft a 2009 summary of activity in The Life Scientists room at FriendFeed.

• Knowledge Plaza, a Collaborative Platform for Researchers and Experts | tigressse

  Tigressse reviews Knowledge Plaza, a knowledge management and social search platform.

• Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up | Wired

  There’s no success quite like failure. The problem with science, however, isn’t that most experiments fail, it’s that most failures are ignored.

• Twitter science list categories | Sciencebase

  If you’re searching for other scientists on Twitter, look no further than the ~700 compiled by David Bradley. An incredibly useful resource, David has organized “scientwists” in one of eight different categories, including archaeo, bio, chem, earth, physics, sci-comms, tech and space.

• Tweeting expressly prohibited at American Society of Cell Biology annual meeting | Terra Sigillata

  At this year’s meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology, Tweeting has been banned. Abel Pharmboy reports on the prohibition.

• On giving a talk about Open Access in my department | Gobbledygook

  Martin Fenner posts slides from his talk on Open Access in Medicine.

• Interview with Scientist and BenchFly founder, Alan Marnett | BioData Product Blog

  Alex at the BioData Product Blog interviews Alan Marnett, founder of BenchFly, a website for scientists that offers science videos, laboratory techniques and current protocols.

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As 2009 comes to a close, I would like to thank you for your readership. Just shy of one year ago, NGS launched with the goal of examining emerging technologies — including Web 2.0 — and their impact on the scientific method, researchers and the general public. Our aim was to explore The Future of Science and to create a space to discuss Science 2.0: the use of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, folksonomies (tagging), RSS, podcasts and other approaches to participate in conversation and information flow as it pertains to science. We believe these technologies are particularly important as research moves online and becomes connected, since scientists rely on communication and information flow to share and advance knowledge.

Next Generation Science consists of two web sites:

• The Next Generation Science blog (a.k.a. NGS)
• The Next Generation Science Registry

Each site has a different purpose. Here at NGS, we focus on emerging technologies and tomorrow’s science (if you’re interested in contributing, please let us know). Just last week, we introduced the NGS FriendFeed Sciencebot, which will post weekly updates on science-related FriendFeed posts that are particularly interesting; watch for the topic FriendFeed Science Focus. Together with our quasi-monthly Science Spotlight series, we hope to disseminate interesting and useful science resources beyond what is authored here on NGS. Lastly, the Next Generation Science Registry is a digital compendium of science and technology resources.

There are several ways to connect with Next Generation Science, including email or RSS feed, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. If you have an internet-enabled cell phone, Next Generation Science can also be accessed via the mobile web.

Most popular articles for 2009

We’ve calculated the most popular articles for 2009 using two measures, either by the highest number of page views for the year (shown in blue) or by the average number of page views (shown in white and calculated as the number of page views/number of days posted).

Top 6 articles by page view

1. Science Spotlight – March 24th, 2009
   (article #16, 6,073 page views)
2. The Open Laboratory: Interview with Bora Zivkovic
   (article #32; 3,398 page views)
3. GoPubMed: Interview with Michael Alvers
   (article #24; 3,279 page views)
4. Content Intelligence: The Future of Search
   (article #19; 3,046 page views)
5. Connotea: Saving References Made Simple
   (article #14; 2,371 page views)
6. ResearchBlogging.org: Interview with Dave Munger
   (article #3; 2,095 page views)

Top 10 articles by average page views/day

1. Focusing on Science via FriendFeed
   (article #63; average: 65 page views/day)
2. BioKM: Cloud-based Research Knowledge Management
   (article #58; average: 34 page views/day)
3. The End of Impact Factors as a Measure of Research Quality
   (article #51; average: 26 page views/day)
4. FriendFeed Science Focus: this week
   (article #64; average: 22 page views/day)
5. Science Spotlight – March 24th, 2009
   (article #16; average: 22 page views/day)
6. The Open Laboratory: Interview with Bora Zivkovic
   (article #32; average: 21 page views/day)
7. Open Source Science Commons
   (article #49; average: 19 page views/day)
8. 2009 Top 10 Innovations in the Life Sciences
   (article #59; average: 16 page views/day)
9. GoPubMed: Interview with Michael Alvers
   (article #24; average: 14 page views/day)
10. ALSUntangled: Interview with Richard Bedlack
    (article #45; average: 14 page views/day)

Thanks for reading and all the best in the coming year!

My social network on FriendFeed (user: wjjessen) has a clear science focus, which I find especially useful for reading about open access, all types of science resources and the latest science news & research. In particular, the aggregation of scientists in the FriendFeed rooms The Life Scientists and Science 2.0 constantly provide and discuss a plethora of valuable resources and information I haven’t found in other online social networks.

I thought it would be useful to link to those FriendFeed posts that were particularly interesting here on NGS, not only to serve as an external archive but also to help disseminate the links, resources and discussions. To that end, I’ve modified Bob Hitching’s plugin Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter to regularly check for science posts that myself and others have “liked” and link to them from NGS. I’m still tweaking the hacks, but it appears to be working as I intended (we’ll see what happens this week with multiple posts).

The NGS FriendFeed Sciencebot will post weekly updates on science under the topic FriendFeed Science Focus.

UPDATE: January 8th, 2010 I think I’ve worked out the URL bug. Instead of simply numbering posts, each post title and URL will have a unique date stamp based on the week number.

With the help of four distinguished life science researchers, The Scientist rounds up the top 10 innovations in the life sciences for 2009.

It’s been a tough year for every industry, and the life sciences are no exception. Yet companies and academic laboratories across the globe have developed innumerable new products designed to take your research to the next level. But with many lab budgets tighter than last year, which technologies are worth the investment?

That’s why, for the second year in a row, we have gathered a panel of expert judges to pick the year’s best innovations to hit the life sciences market in the past year. This year’s winners run the gamut from imaging, genomics, and other tools that stunningly capture both intracellular and extracellular processes. Our judges — Steven Wiley, Jean Wang, Shawn Levy, and David Piston — are all known for pushing the technical boundaries, and have collectively published more than 600 academic papers.

It may have been a tough year for industry in general, but it was a great one for life science innovation.

What’s cool about the article: brief product write-ups, followed by comments from the judges.

Products listed include 3D cell culture, microarray-based sequence capture, an electron multiplication charge coupled device (EM-CCD) camera, cell manipulation with light, and protein-induced pluripotency in mouse embryonic fibroblast cells.

Check it out at The Scientist

BioKM is a new way to keep research knowledge organized. An internet-based service, BioKM is designed to meet the everyday needs of researchers in an academic lab environment, allowing them to store, search, share and manage laboratory and research data.

BioKM provides a number of tools that enable users to plan and track research projects, organize materials and maintain a knowledgebase. To promote communication and discussion, users are able to exchange comments in all areas of BioKM. I asked Jonathan Gross, founder of BioKM, if NGS could get a closer look at the service and he was happy to set us up with an account. Read on for the review and a special offer for NGS readers.
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• A brief analysis of commenting at BMC, PLoS, and BMJ | I was lost but now I live here

  Shirley Wu assesses the problem of scientists and comments (or rather, the lack thereof) at PLoS, BMJ or BioMed Central. Check out her perspective on Article-level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact with Cameron Neylon at PLoS Biology.

• Reflect | Cell Press Beta

  Reflect is a semantic enhancement tool that identifies and highlights proteins and small molecules mentioned in Cell articles. It is being piloted in two articles from the November 12th issue of Cell.

• First Anniversary (and the scientific method revisited) | Metamodern

  Eric Drexler weighs in on the problem with data-driven science (as opposed to the traditional hypothesis testing science).

• Nature Communications Q&A | Science in the open

  Cameron Neylon interviews Grace Baynes from the Nature Publishing Group communications team about the new journal Nature Communications, an online-only journal that will have an open access option.

• Promoting Open Source Science | WalterJessen.com

  Yours truly was interviewed about Open Source Science for Linux Insider recently. I published the entire interview on my blog since many of the questions and answers were left out of the final article. I trust I did the movement justice.

• Open Source Science? Or Distributed Science? | Common Knowledge

  John Wilbanks reflects on the open source software model and the problem with applying the terminology to science.

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More serious competition for Google?

Starting today, Wolfram|Alpha‘s knowledge, computed from expertly curated data, will enrich Bing’s results in select areas across nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics. Wolfram|Alpha provides immediate, unbiased, and individualized information, making it distinctly different from what has traditionally been found through web search. By using Wolfram|Alpha, Bing recognizes the complementary benefits of bringing computational knowledge to the forefront of the search experience.

via: Microsoft’s Bing — Introducing One of Wolfram|Alpha’s First Commercial API Customers

The question is: are the search results truly more relevant?

I’d gladly trade quantity for quality, or simply better navigation options (not just relevance and date). However, it strikes me that the results from one service won’t augment the other: if I use Bing for a computational query, I’m not interested in the search engine results, and if I search for articles on the AKT/PTEN pathway in tumor development, what useful information will Wolfram|Alpha offer?

The Bing-Wolfram|Alpha partnership is interesting but not one that will likely attract more users and increase market share.

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Last month, Hope started her own blog to showcase science. She’s now writing full time over at Significant Science, where she will discuss interesting, significant developments in science and medicine, as well as articles and interviews on topics such as Science 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, Open Science, the e-patient movement and participatory medicine.

We wish Hope the best on her new venture!