Your wishlist for a cool website for scientists
Corie Lok
Monday, 31 March 2008 21:00 UTC
I co-lead a session about new ‘web 2.0’ websites for scientists. We ran out of time before I got a chance to ask everyone: what kind of website do you wish there was that would help you with your work? What sorts of tools and features would it have? What parts of your work/job would be greatly helped by a well designed website?
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@Maxine: it would be if you made all the data freely available and enforced all these data standards :)
Actually to be fair NPG has taken a leading role on the latter. More seriously a journal should do all of these things, and we can discuss the extent to which different journals are effective at it, but my point is that there are things that don’t belong in journals (I think we agree on that) and that there should be easy means of translating and comparing one to the other.
When I can compare my data off the machine with the published data and then make both available for my group/collaborators/the whole world [delete according to preference] to comment on then I believe we will have the basis for a very cool discussion site. And I don’t mean print them both out on overheads, try to get the scale right and then project them.
We were talking about mashups in another forum but most of them are really pretty lame in practice. What would be more effective at getting the wide spectrum of scientists in (as opposed to the slightly skewed spectrum we see here) than really being able to mashup real up to the minute data? Well it gets me excited anyway :)
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Data published in Nature journals are freely available, Cameron. See here for our policies. If any specific paper you are reading does not conform to these policies, please write to the editor of the journal concnerned, and he or she will take it up with the author.
Thanks, Maxine. -
Sorry, I should have been more specific (and not write these things just before I go to bed – you’ll be pleased to know that by the time I got to bed I was already worried that I’d put that badly). I do know the copyright and policies with respect to data availability at Nature and these are indeed well ahead of most journals. Funnily enough I have concerns about the copyright policies in the long term but that’s a separate issue.
The other side of this is some other publishers (who shall remain nameless) who have attempted to claim copyright over data and actively prevent re-use. Which is more where my comment was motivated from. But that again is a separate issue.
The comment however, was meant to be more about the mechanism than the rights. Nature, as a journal, will have reached my ideal when the data is presented in raw form, as part of the paper, ideally with a direct link through to a mandated deposition site for all the raw data. Enforcing the availability of data through policy is a good first step, but relying on people, both to deposit papers and to make data available will, in my view require both compulsion to reposit, and the development of the tools that will make this easy for people to do as part of the submission process. To put it another way, it’s great to encourage the authors to deposit in PMC, but why not do it automatically (potential copyright issues I guess but are they insuperable)?
But really the point I wanted to make was that if you could make the underlying data from this week’s Nature papers available in NN for people to play with, and perhaps add their own comments and complementary data, that that might be a good way to draw an audience in.
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What Cameron and Deepak said :)
Everyone and their dog thinks they have a cool idea for a “web 2.0” website. What we’re seeing, in terms of moving information around, is a move away from websites as specific destinations and towards web services and platforms, linked together by clients. In other words – you don’t care where the information is located so long as you can get it in and out, process it, mash it up and re-engineer it as you please.
Come join us on FriendFeed for a taste of what it’s all about.
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My wishlist:
1. easy domain name
2. blogs
3. forum
4. chat
5. thematic groups
6. detailed members profile
7. advenced search
8….I edit also a website for scientist using web 2.0… Nanopaprika.eu… what you think about this site?
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Hi Sabine,
For managing citations there is a site that can import and export BibTex and allows you to organise around subjects through the use of Tags, is OpenID enabled, and is in the midst of being integrated with Nature Network. It’s connotea.
It’s a Nature project, and you can have a look here Connotea.
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Publications and scientific literature are undoubtedly a huge resource of primary knowledge. Daily work depends greatly on this knowledge resource. Any tool or platform that makes life easy on these lines would be a boon. Here is my dream wish list come true
this web 2.0 based free service helps discovering newer scientific relations across abstracts. it provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the keywords of your choice.maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies. just play around with their drug, disease, etc entity types and you can actually track a drug or process across various diseases across abstracts :)
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