Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? forum: topic
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Follow-up to "Researchers and web2.0" event, please provide feedback here
Maxine Clarke
Thursday, 25 September 2008 10:17 UTC
Those who attended the “Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0” evening at the British Library (24 Sept 2008) may have some follow-up points and may wish to continue the discussion on some of the topics covered. Please make any comments or provide feedback as a “reply” to this post. Alternatively, any Nature Network user in this group can create their own post in this forum, so please do so if there is a particular point you want to raise that you would like to see discussed in its own thread.
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Replying to my own post, what struck me most about the (excellent, thank you Sarah, Allan, Lee-Ann and colleagues) evening was something Timo Hannay said in the Q/A session. He said publishers are good at publishing objects (journals, articles, and in some cases “web2.0 stuff”) but not good at linking. I agree strongly that we should be doing more about bidirectional linking, whether entities, articles, words, or other – into, out of and between databases and in other ways across the web. This will surely stimulate innovation and other interesting ways to read and use scientific material.
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Hi all
Thankyou for an interesting and informative evening yesterday. There were many well considered comments about the concept of opennotebooks and the difficulty in getting people to engage with them and indeed other collaborative projects like wikis (wikigenes being a good example).
In the case of wikis someone made the point that really the incentive to contribute is really the indirect benefit of possibly more citations on your own work. It is a bit of an obvious point but I think this desire to self promote should be encouraged if it leads to greater engagement with community wikis like Wikigene. If people like yourselves at Nature.com are really interested in promoting scientific adoption of Web2.0 maybe you should consider “gently” encouraging scientists who publish with you to subscribe to something like wikigenes.
The second point i wanted to make last night was about the whole concept of open lab notebooks. As you all know there are arguements aplenty out there setting out why open lab notebooks just wont work. It struck me last night that rather than researchers publishing all their raw data online in an open lab notebook a better way to present your data is with a specific question or problem. http://www.innocentive.com/ is a good example of how using an “information market place” to encourage collaboration and sharing of specific problems might be a more effective way of sharing results. I’m not sure what the currency of this information marketplace would be, but the point was made last night that government funding should be set aside for collaboration through web2.0. This idea might be workable if funding was provided for “Prize money” in an “information marketplace” Thoughts?
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I think that is an interesting and good point, David. At the Nature journals we already encourage, as standard, all authors to upload their detailed protocols into Nature Protocols (a free web 2.0 service called Protocols Network)but we should certainly consider extending that encouragement to other community services that are publicly available, free, annotated and “community-endorsed” (Timo Hannay touched on this – we prefer to encourage participation in these databases and other website when they are at a stage that most people in a community would use or want it.)
On another topic, there is a relevant debate going on at Nothing Shocking, Nature editor Noah Gray’s blog, about rapid publication (or not) of results on the web.
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I recall someone suggesting that more funding for research in this area was needed. Coincidentally this morning I saw the following notice about a cross-council initiative .
The digital economy is an RCUK cross-research council programme, aimed at realising the transformational impact of ICT for all aspects of business, society and government. The EPSRC is working closely with ESRC, MRC and AHRC to ensure the delivery of this important programme.
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I also recall a rather odd comment from someone which seemed to be a veiled plug for Elsevier’s collab2 tool. What was that all about?
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There were a couple of vague plugs. Euan Adie mentioned PostGenomic, several people I think referred to Nature Precedings, and Victor Henning mentioned Mendeley, the literature management software being developed by a company he co-founded.
In terms of ‘prizes’ and rewards for data availability I wrote about this here about the ideas of directly driving data deposition.
I actually disagree with the idea that open notebooks ’can’t work’(but then obviously I would). As funders demand more data availabily after publication people are going to move to electronic recording of laboratory work because they have to to satisfy the funders. When that becomes mainstream, along with the move to larger collaborations, and the consequent nightmares about access to the data between different sites, I think you’ll see quite a lot of open notebooks coming into being.
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Sorry, this was supposed to be about feedback wasn’t it! I had a great time. I thought it was a really interesting group and a good discussion.
Two suggestions: The kind of mixed media (real life and second life) needs some hard thinking to work well. I think it might have helped to have decided in advance whether they really were intended to be interacting as much as possible or treating as two separate streams – the latter is easier but less fun obviously, the former is very hard work and would have benefited from a more structured approach.
Which leads me to the second point which is with so many people it might have been more effective to structure the discussion a bit more. I don’t have any real suggestions on how to do that effectively – possibly some small group discussion followed by reporting?
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Not suprisingly, there was a lot of comments on the night about reputation/attribution and, in effect, citation for Web2.0 contributers, particularly around data.
Re. datasets, I am aware of emerging frameworks for assigning DOIs to data but I wondered if data ‘owners’ (a very loaded term), have any light-weight frameworks – equivalent to the creative commons – that they may draw on to promote citation/recognition for sharing?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying this is always necessary, but if it provides even some incentive to open up more data for re-use….
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Allan or Sarah, I’ve had one person so far ask me if Timo’s talk was recorded, which I know it was – is there any information on where that is going to be held and how people can be directed to find it? Thank you.
I was responsible for the Postgenomic plug so I want to clarify that (incidentally, Euan wrote Postgenomic before he joined NPG and bought it with him, so it is a sort of quasi-plug!). First, the site is doing something to address a disadvantage to blogs and other web 2.0 content which was raised at the meeting. The objection was that there is too much stuff out there to be possible to assimilate. Postgenomic is an index of scientific blogs (ie not all of them, you have to be chosen to be included), and it tracks and filters them for you. So you can customise it according to your own interests, and also you can see which blogs are being most read, most discussed, etc (again by your own filters if you like). It seems to be a very powerful focusing tool, actually enabling people to go deeper quicker.
I hope this does not sound too “promotional” but I discovered Postgenomic some time ago, independently of it being anything to do with NPG, so my enthusiasm for it and admiration for Euan is independent of that!For those interested in knowing more about Mendely, also “plugged” at the BL evening, there is a very good explanation of the service here. The link is to Martin Fenner’s blog, a post in which he interviews Victor and in the process describes the potential of this service (which I myself haven’t tried).
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One of the themes that emerged for me on Wednesday and that is repeated in most discussions about blogging by scientists is that of credit/reward and incentives. Some of the questions – the ’what’s in it for me?’ – feel a little like the criticisms levelled at undergraduates who demonstrate no interest in their studies other than ‘will it be in the exams?’. On the other hand, scientists have a lot of demands on their time etc. But then there are always those ‘high achievers’ – like this guy I met recently from Harvard who blogs 1500 words a day: Geek Doctor
I spent a few years in the university sector and was involved in two RAEs when academic colleagues often debated the quality versus quantity issue. Although each researcher could only submit four ‘outputs’, many wanted to highlight their total output. And RAE panels did consider more than just those four articles per researcher. Departments were able to highlight other ‘achievements’ but as with all things, there had to be a sense of proportionality. Winning an award, sitting on a research council committee or an editorial board are going to carry more weight than the occasional blog post. But as a contribution to the overall output of a research group, some forms of Web2.0 dissemination could and should be mentioned.
So, my point is that while being an active contributer to science blogging will probably never have the kudos of getting a paper in Nature, it may be accepted as a legitimate activity and a valid part of a scientific career. Being prepared to be open about it and regarding it as worthwhile and citing your contributions may be a first step.
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