Our neighbor in Kendall Square, the Broad Institute, hosts a website that allows researchers to annotate the genome of Neurospora crassa (a fungus), called the Community Annotation Project (CAP). Not everyone can annotate of course. Researchers must apply for credentials.

So far, about 50 scientists from around the world, but mainly the US, are listed as community annotators. An interesting project in harnessing the power of online scientific communities to try to improve the quality of data. Can a community of researchers do a better job of genome annotation than a handful of select curators?

Also, have a look at an article from last month’s Plos Biology by two people who have started a life sciences community website, in the same spirit as NNB. They discuss CAP and other community projects for scientists and speculate on the reasons why scientists have been slower than other segments of the population to form/join vibrant online communities. They issue a challenge that I think is worth reiterating here on NNB:

“Thus, in the spirit of advancing scientific progress, we submit a challenge to the research community: play with these tools, and evaluate their utility. If they’re good, tell others. And if they aren’t, tell the designers. This information age is an exciting time in that knowledge is at our fingertips. But if we fail to innovate upon our means of accessing information, the Internet’s promise of providing us what we want will be lost as knowledge is drowned in a sea of facts. These new tools are founded upon the belief that we’re better off working together, but they work only if you think so too.”