Next Generation Science

The fourth annual conference on science and the Web is less than four months away. The free three-day event to explore science online will be held in the Research Park Triangle area (North Carolina) on January 15-17th, 2010. Conference sessions will be held in the Sigma Xi building.

The goal of the conference is to bring together scientists, physicians, educators, publishers, journalists, web developers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science and promoting public understanding of science online.
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Before we begin Josine, I would like to give our readers a little background.

Here is how I came to learn about Elsevier’s new product, SciVal Funding. I work on the free grants and scholarship listing service, ScanGrants. One of the ways I find funding opportunities to list on ScanGrants is by entering into Google and other search engines terms such as “research funding” and “funding opportunities.” It was by doing so a few weeks ago that I started to come across blog postings that mentioned SciVal Funding and later came across a very interesting article that you had written for the April/May 2009 issue of the magazine of the National Council of University Research Administrators about the problems that scientists, especially at the junior scientist level, encounter as they try to land the funding they need to conduct research.

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Being new to the whole subject of Science 2.0 and online social networking communities for scientists, I am taking a look today at Nature Precedings. But that brings up the matter of classification of such things.

Maybe this isn’t a social network for scientists at all, for it says on its site, “What is Nature Precedings? Nature Precedings is a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings. It is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and non-peer-reviewed manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to share preliminary findings, disseminate emerging results, solicit community feedback, and claim priority over discoveries. It also makes such material easy to archive, share and cite.”

And, “Nature Precedings includes materials from biology, medicine (except clinical trials), chemistry and the earth sciences … We do not include submissions in physics because there is already a service (arXiv.org) for the physical sciences.”

And, “Nature Precedings includes manuscripts, posters, and presentations, submitted in PDF, Word or PowerPoint format.”

And, “We will post submissions in all areas of chemistry, the earth sciences, and biomedicine except for clinical medicine. In particular, we cannot accept submissions describing the results of clinical trials or those making specific therapeutic claims. (More general claims, for example that a certain line of basic research may have clinical potential, are usually acceptable.)”

Whew, that was a lot of copying and pasting! But we might as well get that all established before I commence the actual writing of my own opinions in the rest of this piece.
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Being relatively new to the subject of Science 2.0 and the various social networking services and online research platforms marketed to researchers, today I am poking around 2collab. I first tried to determine what exactly it is — a social network for scientists along the lines of ResearchGATE and BioCrowd for those in the biomedical sciences and industry?

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I have been exploring social networks for scientists lately and I have just been looking at BioCrowd. I like it. I heard about it via a message on one of the groups I belong to in LinkedIn and have noticed that it is one of the media partners of the upcoming E-Patient Connections 2009 conference.

The fact that BioCrowd is helping to put on that conference endeared BioCrowd to me because I am planning to attend and I think it could become a really important gathering given the rise of the patient empowerment/user generated healthcare movement, which really does need a conference of its own in addition to the extensive discussion it receives at the equally useful Health 2.0 conference.
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Prodded by my editor who sent me a press release from July 7th, 2009 from ResearchGATE saying, “ResearchGATE.net is now the largest online network for scientists … the ResearchGATE team is pleased to announce that it has welcomed the 100,000th researcher to its scientific network. This astounding accomplishment bears witness to the real value that researchers derive from the platform and establishes ResearchGATE as the largest online network of its kind … ResearchGATE, which launched just over a year ago, is a platform to help scientists access information as efficiently as possible. It provides scientists with an online hub for collaboration and communication. The site features a powerful new search engine designed to facilitate scientific literature queries, as well as “Science 2.0″ functionality such as a network graph and online research groups.”

Pretty confident tone that. So let’s take a look.
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Academic Earth’s mission statement indicates that it was “founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.” Along with number of other online educational video providers, such as MIT OpenCourseWare, Academic Earth is a collection of great courses, which in some cases also includes lecture notes, transcripts and even tests.

Yale graduate Richard Ludlow, 23, launched Academic Earth at the beginning of this year. Within three months the website received over a million visits, half of which from outside the US. It’s easy to see why Academic Earth is so popular. In addition to the website’s elegant and user-friendly layout (similar to Hulu or iTunes), the videos themselves have great production quality, capturing the professor, blackboard notes and discussions with students.

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Those who read what I write about search engines, Science 2.0, Medicine 2.0 and Open Science probably sigh deeply each time I sneak in a mention of the grants and scholarship listing service I work on, ScanGrants. But there is more than shameless marketing in my madness.

After all, it is via ScanGrants that I have learned about all of the above movements and about such highly effective and well-run organizations such as National Organization for Rare Disorders and the Genetic Alliance. And I do learn quite a bit as I work on ScanGrants looking for funding opportunities about the use of Web 2.0 by scientific societies, what such societies and disease advocacy groups fund and what the commitment of each is to various aims. Today, I am going to discuss what I have learned so far about locating scholarships in the health sciences.
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