I recently was very fortunate to attend one of the Howard Hughes Science meetings. One of the matters discussed at the meeting was a proposed HHMI mandate to have all investigators deposit their papers at pubmed central in order to make them freely searchable by internet search engines, since all the content therein is open-access.

Of course the need for this is obvious considering the fact that the public funds most of our research and that most of it is locked away behind subscription only access. On a related note, we all know how often we have struggled to find relevant papers using the PUBMED search interface and hoped that Google would “do a google” on the NCBI PUBMED database. Well it turns out that open-access will basically facilitate that since the search-bots can now troll through all that content.
Following the discussion I did mention connotea to quite a few attendees specifically hoping to convince them of the benefits of “social bookmarking” and how it helps find new content.

I was quite surprised to find that most of them had never heard of social bookmarking , del.icio.us or connotea ( or was I surprised to find that none of them were web2.0 geeks like myself).

Flash forward to this morning when I was naively trying to find myself a review on membrane protein expression using a PUBMED search. After numerous tries with what I hoped were relevant keywords on NCBI-PUBMED , I drew a blank and fortunately had my sister who researches the field send me some references. As I do often nowadays, I promptly started compiling them into a connotea tag titled membrane protein expression.

Then later, I read the post on Rod Pages blog about matching up two keywords using connotea and more importantly linking them to the original reference to create a “new database” using connotea: Which made me think , if only more social bookmarkers a.k.a taggers started using connotea then eventually it will become ( as intended by connoteas creators) a good “searchable” repository of published papers annotated and tagged by experts.
Considering how few people at the Hughes meeting had heard of connotea, I really wished ( for entirely selfish reasons) that more of them (being experts in their respective fields) did also use connotea.
And so I hope that regular connotea users take it on themselves to proselytize connotea a la the proverbial afternoon knock on your door courtesy the Jehovahs witness.

So hopefully , the next time you hear a knock on you lab door it might just benefit all of us that you open the door.

See:
HHMI meeting agenda
Nascent post on linking Treebase and taxon Ids using connotea
Wikipedia entry on Jehovahs Witness
My HHMI meeting connotea tag