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.

Like most people, I tend not to linger over the terms and conditions of a site before signing up but given the wording noted above, “Nature Precedings is a permanent, citable archive …” I might just note that the terms and conditions say, “We do not undertake to keep or make available any material that you or anyone else has contributed to this website for any length or time, and you are advised to make a copy of any material that you wish to keep. We may delete, archive, make unavailable, or comment on any material, and close or suspend any discussion topic without notice.” So much for the permanent part, or am I missing something here?

Aha. Here is more on this issue:

Q: How can I be sure that anything I submit here will remain available and free-of charge?

A: Partly because we say so. But we realise that that won’t be good enough for everyone, so we are in discussions with governmental, academic and not-for-profit organisations about establishing mirror sites in order to guarantee free availability of this content in the long-term.

Okay, so if everyone is comfortable with “because we say so,” I will go ahead and register. But first, given that more and more scientists and other researchers are also bloggers, this is rather important and interesting:

Q: I posted my document on my personal website / blog. Can I also submit it to Nature Precedings?

A: Yes. We suggest that you use the form at the bottom of the document page on Nature Precedings to submit a link to the version on your personal website or blog so that readers can see comments or other additional information provided there.

Q: I posted my document on Nature Precedings. Can I also post it on my personal website / blog?

A: Yes. When authors submit documents to Nature Precedings, they retain copyright and agree to license the document under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 or 3.0 License. Authors are free to (re-) distribute the document as they wish. If you do post your document on your personal website or blog, we suggest that you submit a link to the version on your site.

I find this particularly interesting given that I have been recently investigating the differences between Science Commons and Creative Commons and it takes a certain amount of close reading to figure out how the various forms of the Creative Commons system work. And I was a bit befuddled because the links that Nature Precedings given here both seem to be to 2.5:

Q: I posted my document on Nature Precedings. Can I also post it on my personal website / blog?

A: Yes. When authors submit documents to Nature Precedings, they retain copyright and agree to license the document under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 or 3.0 License. Authors are free to (re-) distribute the document as they wish. If you do post your document on your personal website or blog, we suggest that you submit a link to the version on your site.

All this makes me makes me a little doubtful about the curatorial expertise at Nature Precedings and I would not want to rely on it as an archive — too much jocularity on important matters and sloppiness with links about copyright matters. One expects better things from such a prestige publishing house as Nature Publishing Group (NPG).

But kudos for NPG for setting up such a handsome, useful service. I will now go get registered.

Okay — that was a piece of cake. Good sign.

The homepage is quite elegant and there seems to be plenty of intriguing stuff to check out:

I checked out the process of submitting a document — very straightforward. A dropdown offers the option of manuscript, poster or presentation. We are told, “All submissions are lightly screened.”

I decided to check out what had recently been uploaded under the rubric, “Latest Manuscripts” and was impressed by the fact that there was a least one article that been received and posted on the same day, August 28, 2009. Two days seems to be the average turnaround and there were quite a few papers. This is a well-trafficked site certainly in comparison to Elsevier’s 2collab, which seems wan and blah when set side by side to Nature Precedings. It is truly odd that Elsevier just doesn’t get Science 2.0 to the extent that its far more nimble rivals NPG and Springer do. It isn’t like Elsevier doesn’t have the money or the brainpower to get into the Science 2.0 ring better. They do seem to be inviting in some brilliant experts to bring them up to speed, like Cameron Neylon.

But getting back to Nature Precedings, I browsed through the latest manuscripts. Again, all seemed handsome and a model of sleek Web design:

Nice screenshot of the papers with votes for each visible (three votes seemed a good day for each author). I clicked around and decided to check out the paper, “Jellyfish as vectors of bacterial disease for farmed fish.” Seemed like something at about my intellectual grasp as opposed to more arcane subjects such as, “Hematopoietic Cell Types: Prototype for a Revised Cell Ontology.”

Vis-a-vis the jellyfish article, it was by, “Hugh W. Ferguson et al.” I wanted to know more about Hugh W. Ferguson so clicked on his name, assuming that would take me to a profile page of him or a list of his other articles. But no, I was presented with a page highlighting the jellyfish article:

That was useful, but not what I was hoping for or expecting. Thus, Nature Precedings really does serve as an archive and repository and not so much as a social network for scientists the way Nature Networkdoes.

But let me waffle on that. Nature Precedings is a quasi social network in that when I clicked on the link for the paper up popped a beautifully arranged page showing the institutional affiliations of the authors, an email link to the main author, a PDF of the paper and so on. This is Science 2.0 at its finest.

Just think of the trouble academic librarians have in cajoling science faculty to deposit papers in institutional archives. Part of the problem for these long-suffering librarians is that researchers may (a) not see the value of archiving vis-a-vis their personal reputation and influence, (b) may not want to go to the trouble of mastering clunky software systems like Dspace (and I know some librarians will swear that it is user-friendly and all that, but I didn’t find it so), and (c) not want to have to go through library staff to archive and so don’t archive at all.

Uploading papers to Nature Precedings is as easy as pie and the results are not branded to the academic’s own institutional archive — and let’s face it would you rather have your paper on a site under the aegis of NPG or sitting in an obscure institutional repository in the middle of nowhere as far as the panjandrums that hold sway in the sciences are concerned and to which you would have to direct potential readers and the pathways of which they would have to master? Everything is so much easier on Nature Precedings.

But then again, institutional repositories are primarily for finished products, not pre-publication research and preliminary findings, which is what Nature Precedings is for. That is the problem librarians face in selling faculty on institutional repositories. Institutional repositories don’t have the immediacy and up to the minute timeliness of something like Nature Precedings and by the time the paper is finished, various versions of it may have already have made the rounds to the faculty’s peers elsewhere, thus de-incentivizing the act of archiving in institutional repositories. These are the kinds of issues that Science 2.0 brings up for the library profession.

One feature of Nature Precedings that I found really useful and slick and that anyone organizing an academic conference and who wants to ensure optimal dissemination of the resulting papers should know about is that you can create a collection that enables visitors to browse those papers. This is an ideal way to apprise those have not yet heard of your professional organization and its conferences to pique their interest in them.

For instance, I saw on the homepage of Nature Precedings that one of the highlighted collections was the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology University at Buffalo, NY. July 24-26, 2009. I clicked on that and read about the conference, was able to link out to the site of the conference itself and found this passage both edifying and a good example of effective marketing in the biomedical sciences, “… as ontologies become more commonly used, the problems involved in achieving coordination in ontology development become ever more urgent. To address these problems there is a need for an overarching conference which brings together representatives of all major communities involved in the development and application of ontologies in biomedicine and related areas. ICBO is designed to meet this need.”

So I browed through the papers in that collection, came across this quite interesting one, learned about a project and consortium that I had not heard of, and made a mental note that the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology seemed like a gathering of smart cookies in the world of e-science and big data:

The goal of OBI is to enable a formal representation of biomedical investigations that captures the experimental evidence on which their findings are based. The scope of OBI includes: materials made in and produced for investigations, research objectives, experimental protocols, roles of people in investigations and processing and publication of data gathered in investigations. Use of OBI will allow comparison of experimental data from the wide array of scientific disciplines represented by domain experts in the OBI consortium. OBI follows the principles laid out by the OBO foundry, and integrates tightly with other foundry candidate ontologies, such as GO (www.geneontology.org) and ChEBI (www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/) whose terms are used to describe biological reality. The use of OBI by the scientific community to represent or annotate their investigations within electronic data resources will facilitate interdisciplinary data synthesis, enable access to their data on the semantic web and improve third-party understanding of information related to life-science and clinical investigations.

And the paper was in PDF — the better to send it to others who would find it interesting.

The voting process was interesting in that there is no vetting of the expertise of the voters. You just have to be a registered user of Nature Precedings. For instance, I just clicked to vote for this presentation:

… even though I did so simply because it looked interesting and not because I have any background in epidemiology or bioinformatics. But hey that’s okay given that we are told, “Voting is intended to be an informal way of showing support for a researcher’s work.”

I decided to try the “Browse by subject” feature and chose “Neuroscience.” Quite a few of the papers were interesting. One was this quite fascinating bit of medical history, “The History, Development and Impact of Computed Imaging in Neurological Diagnosis and Neurosurgery: CT, MRI, and DTI.”

Rather touching that the author, Aaron G. Filler, seems to be an incredibly busy and productive neuroscientist who takes the time to contribute worthily and interesting to the history of medicine. That is the nice thing about such things as Nature Precedings. It enables scientists to share articles on subjects in which they are intellectually engaged that may not meet the stringent requirements of traditional journals.

And even though Nature Precedings might seem at first glance a rather dry collection of papers in some instances, it redounds to the credit of NPG that it features in the unlikely venue of the comments section of the paper, “Small critical RNAs in the scrapie agent” a lively discussion of the mores of online peer review that includes such biting comments as these:

Peer-review is not primarily meant to be a hassle for scientists eager to publish their findings. It is also a mean of protecting authors, e.g. by pointing out logical flaws, missing controls, alternative interpretations, etc. Not only does the process improve the quality of published science, but it also helps authors avoiding potential embarassment.

This paper appears to represent a good case in point. A plausible interpretation is that the traces of infectivity detected by the authors represent residual contamination stemming from the 263K inoculum. There would be valid ways to test for that, however no such efforts were undertaken. Experienced referees would have advised the authors to perform these tests before going public.

Time will tell whether the bypassing of the peer-review process, in this case, will have done any good to science at large and to the authors specifically …

The comment was responded to that very day by an NPG staffer:

Hilary Spencer on 19 June 2009 21:06 UTC

(Disclosure: I am the Product Manager for Nature Precedings). Nature Precedings is not designed to bypass the peer-review process, but to act as a complement. The ability of preprint servers to complement the traditional peer review and editorial process has already been demonstrated with the use of the preprint server arXiv in the physical sciences. Many of the articles later peer-reviewed and published in Nature Physics are first posted on arXiv prior to (or concurrently with) journal submission. We believe that the use of arXiv benefits the physics community at large and helps to accelerate the research cycle, and many authors believe feedback they receive from the service benefits their research. Nature Precedings is intended to bring the same benefits to the biomedical community.

One of the benefits is that authors are able to receive (hopefully) helpful comments from others who may not have participated in the traditional peer-review process, thereby leading to more robust (and open) research.

Thus, Nature Precedings is very much worth looking at by librarians, working scientists, those in the biomedical industry (many bright minds here, pharmaceutical industry headhunters) and even social scientists and those in the information sciences interested in how online communities are changing the way scientists interact and convey their findings to an ever wider audience. This is Science 2.0, Open Science, Research 2.0 and social networking all rolled into one.

And good for Science Commons for being one of the partners along with the British Library (which should drop the silly upside down thing-not the way to convey professionalism to have a dumb icon), the Wellcome Trust among other fine institutions:

On the down side, Nature Precedings doesn’t have much multimedia stuff and the RSS feeds don’t seem to work.

But I was very impressed. This is one A-number one product and a model of the latest and greatest in modes of scientific communication.

Are you a Twitter user? Tweet this!

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.

Interestingly, Elsevier, the owner of 2collab defines it in at least two ways on the very same page. We read:

2collab is a new type of research tool launched in 2007 — a collaboration platform designed specifically for researchers in the science, technical and medical communities [...] 2collab works by being a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources — such as research articles from any publisher, blogs, websites, and more.

So it is a research platform that is founded upon a well established technology — social bookmarking. Not much new or exciting here, certainly not when compared to the extensive array of Web 2.0 features that one can employ in, say, the Life Scientists room of FriendFeed.

And so I decided well, given Elsevier’s huge wealth of resources such as ScienceDirect and Scopus, I would put on my library school graduate cap in order to see how Elsevier is wooing librarians as conduits to the research community given librarians’ role as custodians of Scopus and ScienceDirect. So I clicked on the link to download the Librarian Factsheet. But that didn’t take me to any such sheet on 2collab that I could see, but simply to a general page about ScienceDirect. Grrrr. Very annoying and bad marketing. Elsevier really needs to get its act together on integrating its outstanding products such as ScienceDirect — as it is doing superbly with its neat and innovative funding platform SciVal Funding.

But the people in charge 2collab just don’t seem to know how to leverage the treasure trove of Elsevier’s journals of ScienceDirect — now easier to search than heretofore, thanks to Elsevier’s wise engagement of NextBio to render the riches of ScienceDirect more searchable.

For example, while there is a handy offering of a selection of screencast tutorials, none of them really make a compelling case for why one would want to use 2collab. After all, social bookmarking is old news and it is not like Connotea and CiteULike don’t exist.

2collab is probably of most use to well ensconced researchers with access to well-funded research libraries and yet Elsevier doesn’t even seem to be pitching it to the researchers who are so well placed. It seems to be pitching it to researchers in general and not all of them have access to ScienceDirect, which is 2collab’s main strength and even that is underplayed. It is free, but so are FriendFeed, Connotea, etc. Is there any particular reason to use 2collab?

I checked out the 2collab blog, but the most recent entry there dated back to April 23, 2009. I clicked on the “Press” button and got this:

Not a lot of buzz here.

Interestingly, the product manager for 2collab Michael Habib:

… clearly does get social networking in the sciences being active on FriendFeed:

… and Twitter:

Yet his know — how in the world of Science 2.0 just doesn’t see to be enlivening 2collab. But admittedly, it is a tall order to try to combine the free and open world of Science 2.0 with the toll access world of Elsevier.

So let is take a look at what is in fact free on 2collab.

After a few clicks, I figured out how to display groups alphabetically. Not too excited by the first page:

On a site designed for researchers, I am immediately put off by junky stuff about college football.

On the plus side, I clicked on the tab for discussions about 2collab itself and was taken quite seamlessly to this nicely formatted page:

And could tell who had posted it — in this case our friend Michael Habib himself and what else he had bookmarked:

And returning to the page giving the link I was interested in I was wafted to a very useful discussion of 2collab and related services.

That is all very nice. But do I need the framework of 2collab to find such items? After all, there is Google and other search engines. And Twitter is getting ever better at search for tweets that lead to blog posts.

But part of the selling point of 2collab is its utility and value to serious researchers. So let us examine it from that standpoint.

Here we run to Web site design problems. I wanted to examine 2collab had to offer on the subject of neurology and neuroscience. I was able to get it to display groups alphabetically and to choose 100 items per page. But I couldn’t get a simple a-z listing. Instead, I got the annoying number of pages thing:

Grrr redux. How the devil am I supposed to know on what page neurology and neuroscience are to be found? Oh jeez, guess I have to guess and try page 15 as a start. Oh, rats — that won’t work, as I can go only by smallish increments and so have to click on 7 and work my way up to where neurology and neuroscience probably are, as 7 gets me only to C. This kind of poor Web design execution ill behooves an information powerhouse like Elsevier.

I tried page 10 — took me up only to E.

I finally figured out that I could search via a search box dropdown by subject of group — but there does not seem to be a group for neurology or neuroscience as broad subject areas, but only for subjects only tenuously connected to the subject of my search:

And each of those groups has only one member.

I decided to try to find a group for my main interest, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. No results for groups. Decided to try “search bookmark titles.” No results. Well, knowing that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is also called Lou Gehrig’s, I tried that. No results. Knowing that ALS is a form of motor neuron disease I tried “motor neuron.” That gave a single result and it was an abstract in PubMed — and why not just do your search in PubMed in the first place?

The search engine is dismally limited.

2collab does enable users to email other members, via 2collab’s mediation. But GoPubMed does that and so does LinkedIn.

And there isn’t much going on here compared to the pretty extensive use of Web 2.0 bells and whistles of BioCrowd. There doesn’t seem much buzz in librarian circles about 2collab and not much use of talk of it in Science 2.0 realm. Except for it the potential integration it with Elsevier’s other offerings, 2collab is basically a blah social bookmarking tool. If any major researchers or institutions are using it, you sure could not tell from clicking around in it.

To be fair, at least Elsevier is trying to get into Science 2.0 by launching initiatives like this. It’s not inexpensive to design, engineer and host these things. But traction is not evident for this one. In this case, market research was asleep. I can see the need for the quite exciting Elsevier product SciVal Funding. However, 2collab is a case of building it without determining why they would come or how to persuade them to.

Are you a Twitter user? Tweet this!

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.

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.

I had looked and written about ResearchGATE last week and it is striking how much BioCrowd surpasses it in sleekness of look and the extensiveness of the Web 2.0 functionality BioCrowd offers compared to the fairly lackluster offerings of ResearchGATE in that respect. Perhaps that is because ResearchGATE is geared toward hardcore researchers, whereas BioCrowd markets itself to bioscience professionals (such as those in more lucrative lines such as pharmaceutical marketing and investment banking) and therefore may have more money at its disposal for Web site development spending.

In any case, BioCrowd is a handsome site.

Interestingly, for those of us who are enamored with the lively social networking in the sciences that one finds in the Life Scientists room of FriendFeed and FriendFeed’s Science 2.0 room, it is indicative of the fascination and usefulness of both of those rooms and other science and tech-related rooms in FriendFeed that BioCrowd features the FriendFeed Logo prominently on its homepage:

… and significant that it has done little in FriendFeed at all other than announce the launch of BioCrowd itself:

After all, why would you devote time and manpower to building up a presence on a rival site?

I do like BioCrowd. It has the all the requisite Web 2.0 bells and whistles that ResearchGATE notably lacks. The stuffy among us might snort pompously about the presence of video clips and podcasts. But such things do have value and do edify and educate.

For instance, I am not a neuroscientist. But I do have an intense interest in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I had a vague understanding of apoptosis and its connection to ALS. So I actually did stop to watch the video about the process that is featured under the heading, “Fresh Content From BioCrowd.” That was a surprisingly compelling bit of filmmaking and I found myself actually getting actually quite teary thinking of what devastation apoptosis can wreak upon good, kind people and watching that video made me read more about the process and to wish that high school science teachers across the country would show that clip to their classes and thereby, perhaps, get kids interested in the incredibly fascinating world of molecular and cellular biology which in such clips can seem as exciting and as beautiful as underwater and planetary exploration.

That is the mark of a good Web site — it educates and stimulates emotional responses and thought. BioCrowd does that — and now I will get to its equally worthwhile professional purposes.

One marvekous feature of BioCrowd is the “Twitters” feature of “BioCrowd Buzz.”

I love Twitter so was intrigued by that feature (and it looks to be an excellent vehicle to increase one’s own social media profile).

I glanced over the entries and noted this one:

Now just to illustrate the power of BioCrowd as a social media tool: I read Alex Savic’s tweet. I viewed the video he recommended and found it absolutely outstanding and became even more impressed with Kru Research and delighted that BioCrowd is helping to put on E-Patient Connections 2009 and helped plug that in a bit of free viral marketing by tweeting about that superb video overview (which features a bit about PatientsLikeMe. which is so important for the well being of ALS patients). I also wanted to know who Alex Savic is so found him on Twitter (@alensa) and am now following him there and via his Twitter account checked out his blog and saw that he is presenting a paper at Medicine 2.0, Toronto, which I am also doing (about my beloved ScanGrants — gotta get my trademark plug of that into this column) and so will be much more motivated to attend his presentation, having already read about him via BioCrowd:

In the respect of enabling me to quickly learn quite a bit about Alex Savic in just a few minutes (and I liked the personal note to him from BioCrowd co-founder Clifford Mintz, “Hi Alex, Thanks for joining. We share a common passion biosimilars!”), BioCrowd stands up well to rivals such as LinkedIn and FriendFeed.

I liked the page of podcasts and videocasts (but I didn’t see any of the latter):

… and as I write this I am listening to the podcast of the interview with the remarkable Young Turk of Medicine 2.0, Bertalan Mesko. The interview was well conducted and the choice of Mesko as a featured personage a good one, given what an up and comer he is in so many fields: Medicine 2.0, medical search and the e-patient movement. The interview was well conducted and interesting.

This page has potential, but many of the podcasts were several months old and didn’t open in a separate window but gobbled up my one window, forcing me to open a second one to find BioCrowd’s homepage again.

But it is nice to be able to apprise oneself of sources of podcasts that one did not know of before and those who publish such series as these:

http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/

http://beta.microbeworld.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=37:meet-the-scientist&layout=blog&Itemid=155

… might want to arrange for placement of their feeds on BioCrowd. The more visibility for such useful resources the better.

The extensive BioCrowd Buzz on the homepage makes for rather interesting reading. Here was something useful for those interested in making their mark as scholars as they think tenure, tenure, tenure:

The potentially useful page on upcoming conferences (I am deeply into conferences) was a disappointment because it took far too many clicks to get to the page that contained that info I was intrigued by only to see that the conference was sold out and had occurred some weeks ago, in any case. Too bad that this useful feature is not more carefully monitored and cleaned up periodically.

This being a member-driven community, there is a bit of tiresome, non-science-centered fluff that one doesn’t find at the more sober ResearchGATE. Here are some of the listings for G, for instance:

• Genetics
• Genomic and proteomics
• Genomics
• Glioblastoma
• Glioma
• Golden Retrievers
• Golden Rice
• Golden retrievers
• Golf

Golf is not what I looking for when in a site about biomedicine.

But for all that fluff, there are some golden nuggets here. For instance, I have just been away from this post because I have been off in Twitter reading some very good blog posts about Open Science and academic publishing that I came across because I clicked around in BioCrowd and came across this man:

Because I wanted to determine what sort of people are members of BioCrowd, I had clicked on the link on the homepage Institution/Company:

And decided to see if anyone from Elsevier (a good gauge of gravitas in science matters and therefore of social networks in the sciences) was a member and Cesar Sanchez is and so checked out his Twitter page (@TwistedBacteria). He had excellent tweets about Science 2.0 (good for Elsevier for getting into the Science 2.0 swing of things by allowing staff to tweet freely about academic publishers, even if some of the tweets point to blog postings that excoriate outfits like Elsevier) such as one about the upcoming ScienceOnline2010 conference. Thus, I now have learned about some smart people in Science 2.0 and Medicine 2.0 via BioCrowd. Way to go, BioCrowd.

The Bioresources page could use some major beefing up. Good start, but pretty thin. That is the trouble with trying to maintain pages dependent on member input — slothfulness is the default fallback of most human beings.

All in all, I would say BioCrowd has potential and excels at leveraging Twitter in its own offerings.

Are you a Twitter user? Tweet this!

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.

Pretty confident tone that. So let’s take a look.

Registering was easy. Got a confirmatory email a few minutes after I registered. Good start.

I find the interface slightly blah and uninviting, but that is more a matter of taste and pickiness on my part than any reflection on ResearchGATE.

Being unfamiliar with the site, I poked around in various sections and being used to the liveliness of the Life Scientists room of FriendFeed, I was a bit underwhelmed by the lack of activity in the Feedback Common interest area, with the most recent comments from August 15th, 2009 and July 19th, 2009 left unaddressed by ResearchGATE. Hellooo — anyone there? Hello?

But maybe Feedback rooms are not the liveliest part of online networks. Therefore, I decided to check out “Related groups.” I must have at some point in the past several months indicated various of my interests. I first looked at ResearchGATE several months ago and found it to be rather devoid of interest but am returning to it now, as it does seem to have gained some traction, but still seems overrated to me.

One thing I do notice is that the membership seems non-US centered and seems heavily Indian and European. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But as an American, I just like to see a strong American presence in social networks. Comfort level thing.

One thing I found a bit frustrating as a new user was that the list on the homepage of Related groups would change by the time I returned to it. For instance, I noted that there was a group called Web Intelligence, but the link had vanished by the time I got back to the homepage. Oh, well — maybe rotating the list facilitates awareness among new users of the variety of groups. And the fact that Web Intelligence had disappeared prodded me to explore the list of related groups:

Now here I was bewildered (this is the library school graduate in me coming out) by the lack of logic in the categorization of the groups. It didn’t seem to be alphabetical nor by number of members nor by subject matter (e.g., why are international relations and evolutionary computation next to each other?).

I clicked on the category, “Science & Publication 2.0″ and found an intriguing but slightly fishy looking writing competition that had been posted July 30 and with the latest comment having been made August 5 and nothing since.

So that category was rather a bust and my interest in ResearchGATE was decreasing by the minute. It seems to be basically a 2006 framework touted as Science 2.0 2009.

I decided to check out the Neuroscience category and again, the lack of activity was off putting. I am writing this on August 18, 2009 and the most recent comment in that category was made on Jul 10, 2009. Has nothing of interest happened in neuroscience in that interval? Note, “Files in this group: 0.” Time to move on from this dud of a category. If there is little on interest in what should by the utterly absorbing category of neuroscience, there is probably little on interest elsewhere in ResearchGATE.

But I will keep looking. I will head back to the homepage and check out, “Active groups,” in the hope that some of them might actually be active.

Alas, not particularly. I tried Genetics — most recent comment dated from July 10. Files in this group: 0.

The category Artificial Intelligence had a useful heads-up dated August 4th, 2009 to this rather useful call for papers, but that was one of the few instances I saw on ResearchGATE that linked out to something of interest. On the whole, ResearchGATE seems like a run-of-the-mill discussion board and in the age of Twitter when I can follow a huge number of science bloggers and communicate with them fluidly and rapidly, the whole set-up of ResearchGATE just seems so passé. Sorry to be harsh. But you have to call like ya see it.

Even as a discussion board, ResearchGATE seems quite limited. I got used to the many features and potential of that genre in PatientsLikeMe and that is not even for scientists but simply for laypeople afflicted with illnesses such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. You would think that with the plethora of tools available for scientific communication, there would be more to ResearchGATE than there is. Nope.

For comparative purposes, I just popped over to Scientist Solutions and that seemed much more useful and functional from a pure Web design standpoint:

And featured the useful category SciEvents:

And, by the way, that would be a good place to post this important one:

ScienceOnline2010
http://everyone.plos.org/2009/08/17/plos-at-scienceonline2010/

But first things first, I have to finish this review.

I found much of ResearchGATE downright mystifying. For example, I clicked on the tab, Researchers and was given a list of researchers but had no idea how the list was organized. Again, not alphabetically. Nor by field (pace the wording, “Browse through researchers with a strong scientific relation” there isn’t much connection between livestock production and data structures.)

The literature search feature is unimpressive and heavily dependent on PubMed and you might as well just leave ResearchGATE and go to PubMed.

And as for the 100,000 member figure — take that with a grain of salt. I am a member and have done nothing on the site. And in my unscientific survey using the field of biochemistry as a representative sample, neither have most of the members of that group:

All in all, ResearchGATE seems a gateway to nowheresville. I am heading back to FriendFeed and Twitter and think I will check out BioCrowd next.

Are you a Twitter user? Tweet this!

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.

This situation is particularly unfortunate given that on the home page of Jumper are the words, “Eliminate static models.” It is so lame and really inexcusable (if I were a Jumper employee with a strong commitment to Web 2.0 and Science 2.0, I would be furious and mortified) that there is no real evidence of Web 2.0 know-how anywhere on the Jumper site. Jumper seems to exemplify companies that are simply tarring up fairly standard intranet packages with the buzzwords of Science 2.0 and Research 2.0. It could be that Jumper really is innovative and is leveraging the participatory aspects of Web 2.0 in ways that corporate science and biotech firms need. But it is hard to tell. We are simply told on Jumper’s Web site things like, “At Jumper, we understand the fundamental power that a truly collaborative research environment can have for biomedical research. Web 2.0 technology can profoundly impact biomedical research by transforming the means and methods of communication and collaboration.”

And yet, aside from a link to an interview with Data Storage Magazine (not exactly the periodical of choice for Science 2.0 types, but probably reassuring to the old-line IT guys that is the true audience that Jumper is probably hoping to attract with soothing words of reassurance about Web 2.0) there is almost nothing about the management team and the pages about partners seem more about wishful thinking than actual business being transacted.

One of the problems that seems to plague business is that it doesn’t quite get that much of Science 2.0 takes place out of the stifling intranet world and that it is probably not feasible to try to make intranets something that they have been shown incapable of becoming: freewheeling fora for vigorous discussion of potentially transformative developments. Yes, data should be rendered findable and exchange thereof facilitated. But prose on a Web site doesn’t make that happen.

I never will understand why tech firms don’t feature screencasts. LabRoots has one. It is such a no-brainer. Basic, basic, basic. Never make potential customers have to email you for more info if you can grab their attention with a 3-minute screencast.

UPDATE: March 28, 2009

Jumper posts open-source version 2 code for download.

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.

NPG has an advantage over Elsevier and Springer in that it has a much more extensive line-up of magazine-like publications (e.g. Nature) than its rivals. Granted, Elsevier’s The Lancet is somewhat of that category, but Elsevier on the whole lacks the flash of the Nature publications. Springer may be facing the reality of the open access world more nimbly than Elsevier but has nothing comparable to NPG’s community sites. NPG has bench depth of journalists used to speed.

I have been looking at two examples of NPG’s forays into Science 2.0: the Nature Network and Nature Precedings. This article will discuss the Nature Network.

Here is a bit from its site: “Nature Network is the professional networking website for scientists around the world. Think of it as the online meeting place where you and your fellow scientists can gather, share and discuss ideas, and keep in touch …. Nature Network is completely free … We recognize that the web is a powerful medium not just for disseminating scientific information, but also for building communities and providing an interactive forum for the exchange of ideas.”

I have looked at smaller Science 2.0 sites, such as LabRoots, Scientist Solutions and 2collab, and it is at once clear that NPG is pouring money and talent into Nature Networks. Elsevier may be trying to compete, but its efforts seem half-hearted and the results meager by comparison with the richness of material and navigability of Nature Network.

Signing up for Nature Network was a straightforward matter (unlike, say, the interesting but rather time-consuming registration procedure for Scientist Solutions). The site is divided into four sections: forums, groups, people and blogs. Forums are used to discuss discipline-specific topics; groups can be set up for a lab, department, institution or subject of interest. The people section allows you to see recently active users and newest members. The blogs section enables users to set up their own blog; you can also read and post comments on other people’s blogs.

It is interesting to see who took a tentative stab at blogging within the framework of Nature Network but went on to other venues. For instance, I wanted a grasp of how many blogs are featured on Nature Network so scrolled through the first few letters of the alphabetically listings and came across, “Bertalan Meskó’s blog.” Blogs are listed by title, so Mr. Meskó’s is to be found under B rather than M, which is a problem if you know the name of the blogger but not the name of the blog — “Meskó’s” came up in the search engine but not “Bertalan.”

Now, I happen to know that Bertalan Meskó is a brilliant Hungarian medical student and one of the developers of the excellent medical search engine, ScienceRollSearch (read my recent interview with Bertalan Meskó on AltSearchEngines.com). He has an active blog of his own outside the walls of Nature Network, ScienceRoll, so it could be that he just popped in to apprise members of the network of the existence of ScienceRoll and that that was all he needed and wanted to do in Nature Network since that one post in March 2008. However, it does suggest that blogs come and go in Nature Network.

One of the first discussions I read in Nature Network gives some indication of what those who participate in it are looking for in terms of raising their own visibility via blogging at it. One person wrote, “… starting a blog on NN is a big luxury and unlike other blogging sites in that respect, because you’re starting right into a relatively tight community and your chances of getting some comments are higher.”

The sorts of questions asked on Nature Network illustrate how people find their way in Science 2.0. Here is one such exchange:

I’d like to contribute to a blog on neuroscience, but definitely don’t have the time to sustain a worthwhile site alone. I’ve staked out a great name, brainy.org, and would like to talk with anyone interested in doing something as a group.

This was posted by a physician at Washington University in St. Louis and responded to within the day by one of the editors at NPG, who suggested:

Hi Ford, you could also try posting this question in the neuroscience forum. Good luck …

The Neuroscience forum actually shows little activity — a few posts every few months. That seems to be a problem with several of the fora. For instance, there are a few desultory posts between November 2007 and January 2009 discussing the lack of activity on the epigenetics forum with offers to help those in need of input but no evidence that such offers were accepted.

I was curious as to feedback (which Nature is admirably transparent about). I clicked on the forum posting, “Why The Nature Network Will Never Be Popular in its Current State …” only to get an error message.

Much of the interest in Nature Network at this point lies not in scientific breakthroughs making news on it (not much press about anything happening there, that I could see) but in the discussion of what users want in a Science 2.0 community. The What’s Next forum is well worth perusing for those interested in the design of such communities and those studying from a social science standpoint the development of such networks.

Rather surprisingly, much of what is on the site is quite low tech. There is social bookmarking and there are RSS feeds. But videos and podcasts are scarcely in evidence. It is basically a message board system flavored with may of the features of blogs (i.e. the blogger posts a column and hopes for comments). Much of the discussion appears to involve the philosophy of science, rather than hardcore basic science. Maybe that is where Elsevier could make its Science 2.0 mark, if it got its act together. But then old-line publishers are the antithesis of the Science 2.0 mindset. And maybe some scientists still prefer to communicate about serious professional matters in specialized venues and on a person-to-person level, not the wild Web.

The doesn’t seem to be much activity in certain fields. A search of “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” turned up a profile of a young Indian scientist interested in stem cells, a forum on the related topic of Astrocytes in Human Evolution and some newsy blog postings on ALS-news emanating from Boston at various times in recent years.

Nature Networks is well worth a visit to get an idea of the interest in science journalism by would-be writers and to gauge the state of science blogging and information exchange in the Science 2.0 era. There are no big names and nothing absolutely groundbreaking. But it is a serviceable social networking vehicle for science.

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.

Here’s how I discovered Scientist Solutions:

I help edit the free health sciences grants and scholarship listing service, ScanGrants. Periodically, I  Google the term “ScanGrants” in the hope of discovering that it has  been added to the database listings of yet another medical or academic  library, or office of research administration at a university somewhere.

While doing this one night, I came across a link to ScanGrants in Scientist Solutions. A member of Scientist Solutions had linked to “Request for Applications: Basic & Clinical Research in Autism,” which was a grant announcement I had found at the site of the foundation, Autism Speaks. I was pleased — here was an example of a scientist alerting his peers to a grant opportunity that I had myself found in much the same way — by surfing the Web and sharing what I found.

This is classic Web 2.0. That is to say, carrying on conversation and decentralized control of information flow. These technologies enable researchers who may not have access to expensive proprietary funding databases such as Community of Science to learn about grants. By spreading around news of funding opportunities, it also increases the likelihood that foundations will be able to draw upon a larger pool of qualified applicants.

With online communities, it is often difficult to determine who’s running the show. Case in point: the About Us details of Scientist Solutions are sketchy. There isn’t any in depth information on the management team. I had to do quite a bit of digging to determine (via a LinkedIn profile) that the president of Scientist Solutions is Joseph “Rusty” Bishop, that he is a research scientist at University of California, San Diego, that his goal is, “To facilitate communication between bench scientists and life science manufacturers to speed the process of scientific discovery” and that his specialty is, “… bridging entrepreneurship and bench science.” Given the impressive list of sponsors of Scientist Solutions, I would say he’s pretty good at that.

I wanted to see in what category the link to ScanGrants had been placed in. I found the category, Funding Available and was able to set up an email alert. Indeed, it was so easy that it was set up before I had fully decided to go that far. There is also good RSS functionality.

Joseph Bishop posted a rather useful item about a lifesciences grant from Corning. But when I tried to view details about Mr. Bishop, there was hardly any information. The same holds true with the other members of Scientist Solutions. Given that one driving aims of Science 2.0 is interconnectedness and social solidarity, the paucity of detail about each member is a problem. I have just popped over to Nature Network and was able to click on the picture of various bloggers and moderators and get very detailed profiles. For example, Maxine Clarke’s profile provides a good deal of information: “I am an editor at Nature, the scientific journal. I also run Nature Publishing Group’s authors’ and reviewers’ website, Nautilus (the blog for authors), Peer to Peer (the blog about peer review) and a Nature Network blog archiving my From the Blogosphere weekly column in Nature. I am one of the editors answering Network users’ questions on the Ask The Editor forum.”

There is potential with Scientist Solutions. Those in research administration and headhunters in pharma might be interested in a firm advertising on the funding page, NaviGRANT, whose website offers an inside look at the ferocious world of grants in the sciences and an intriguing look at the skullduggery and stealth and poaching that goes on in certain fields in need of the best and brightest.

It is interesting to compare Scientist Solutions with LabRoots.

LabRoots has a much slicker interface and to me, the key advantage of a slick screencast. Gotta have one of those! Scientists are busy people and social networking takes time rather than, in most instances, saving it. Screencasts can sell a potential user on a site.

The search engine on Scientist Solutions is mediocre and the site is pretty thin on many things the Web 2.0 generation expects: video clips, podcasts, etc. It is basically a discussion board and not terribly vibrant in that respect. For example, the funding page is posted to only sporadically and it is not easy to determine what fora topics there are. The audience seems most interested in the nuts and bolts of lab work, as opposed to the deep think pieces on the Nature Network.

But more power to entrepreneurs in Science 2.0. Anyone who can line up sponsors in this miserable economic climate as Mr. Bishop has done is one skillful guy. I was particularly impressed that within a few minutes of my comment on his post about the Corning lifescience grant I received a private message from him about my comment. That is a pretty impressive level of involvement from the head of site to a new user. It is heartening that there are entrepreneurs working to render science a real-time endeavor and not one mired in the antiquated world of science dominated by the timetables of tenure committees and academic publishers. Keep up the good work, Mr. Bishop.

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.

Here’s how LabRoots defines itself: “LabRoots is a free, social networking site that enables scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals to connect, collaborate with, and learn from each other.”

One thing I found questionable was the rather free and easy use of the term, “… experts in that field.” For instance, we are told that “Each discipline or focus area of the LabRoots site is moderated by experts in that field. These moderators come from all over the world and more than 90% of them have PhDs.”

Now read the profile of one of the moderators:

“Michael Downey B.S., Michael is currently in his second year at the University of Virginia. He is pursuing a double major in Anthropology and Environmental Thought and Practice, as well as a minor in Environmental Science …”

Thus, Mr. Downey appears to have one bachelor’s degree and is now again an undergraduate. He may be a capable, brilliant young man, but he is nevertheless an undergraduate. I don’t think, except in the rarest of circumstances, that most scientists would accept the characterization of undergrads as experts in a field save perhaps software development or something comparably technical. That may be unfair, but it is nevertheless the case. “Expert” connotes gravitas and undergrads don’t exude that, as a rule.

Also, it is not a promising sign of the vitality and sustainability of a social networking site if most of the comments are provided by people somehow connected with the community in an official capacity. For instance, in the Q&A Forum on the quite interesting question, “Medical Research for 2009 — What’s Hottest?” there are five responses; two of them are by me as an experiment on my part. The fact that I inadvertently entered the same response twice shows that there are user-friendliness problems in the commenting section of LabRoots. All of the other answers have been provided by moderators (which is not necessarily a bad thing given that it demonstrates some interest by the proprietors and volunteer or paid staff of a social community in the goings-on in their own fora), save one by the President of LabRoots, Greg Cruikshank.

I checked out Mr. Cruikshank’s own page and wanted to read the article he listed on social networking in the sciences. But I received an error on that one. Not so good if there are quality control problems and link rot on the President’s profile page.

It was often unclear to me how things worked on the site. Take the “Publications” pages for example. It was not clear what the criteria were for inclusion and the links, rather than enabling a user to download a PDF of the paper in question (which is how I interpreted the wording “Click here for complete publication …”), in most cases took me either to PubMed or the toll access page of the article publisher. The Publications feature definitely needs overhauling.

My biggest wish is an alphabetical list of the groups. You can search by discipline but not alphabetically. The Clinical/Health/Medicine category has 10 groups, the largest of which in terms of membership is Molecular Diagnostics with 24 Members. Many groups have one to four members.

One wonders if Science 2.0 can be run on a for-profit basis (though the commercially-run Sermo seems to be making a go of it for physicians in mainstream medicine patient care matters) or whether it can be sustained only by volunteer models, a la Wikipedia. It is hard to see companies such as this making it. There just isn’t much oomph here or anything that sends the blood racing and the brain a buzz. I poked around for purposes of this article, but other than that not much going on here. Good effort, though. Scientists do need to talk to each other. But they probably need to do so via their own professional organizations and in an organic fashion, not within frameworks that work better for patient communities than for serious scientists.

Thank you for subscribing by RSS or email. We work hard to make the articles on Next Generation Science engaging and we truly appreciate your interest and readership!

This article was published on Next Generation Science.