Comments on: Online Science

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:29:34 +0000

I am a full-time researcher from NZ, working in Japan, at a museum with many international research visitors. This multilingual environment made me very aware of:

(1) the difficulties that non-English based researchers face when using English, and

(2) the difficulties that English mono-linguals face when trying to access or publish research in other important research languages, such as Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, French, and so on.

Hence my website: The Research Cooperative – http://cooperative.ning.com

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:03:55 +0000

Thanks Joerg. I’m going to contact you via email about a related aspect of this wrt another of my sites.

By: Joerg Kurt Wegner

Joerg Kurt Wegner — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:14:21 +0000

Thanks for discussing this topic and I commented via miningdrugs.blogspot.com on David Crotty's comments.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:14:55 +0000

Yes, good point Martin. Alexa has finally recognised that it’s old system based on its spying toolbar is not the greatest way to rank websites and has add several new traffic-validated sources to its system. Good news for Sciencebase, which jumped back into the Top 100,000 websites just this week.

By: Martin Lock

Martin Lock — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:50:43 +0000

If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you will definitely want to increase your http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.sciencebase.com Alexa rank, because it will increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

By: Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude Bradley — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:05:20 +0000

I think a lot of people will find this post useful to understand the potential role of social software in science. Concerning openness, Rajarshi points out that he likes to keep some ideas private until he can flesh them out. That is understandable and is not really a problem for Open Science. Where we run into problems with people not being open is making claims about their research without fully backing them up with access to the raw data. And here social software is a golden opportunity because we can post these data sets freely without trying to convince publishers to change their format or policies.

By: Brian Gilman

Brian Gilman — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:43:02 +0000

I asked my users of SciLink to tell me what web 2.0 and social media have helped them to do. I received many responses. The vast majority have discovered that the social web allows them to connect to a vibrant global community enabling them to share experiences, pre-publication information and ideas over the web. This could not have happened if it were not for the social web sites like ours.

Try it out at SciLink

-Brian Gilman
—
Founder
SciLink Inc.

By: mr. gunn

mr. gunn — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:45:39 +0000

Don't forget about Connotea for finding papers you didn't know you needed to read.

By: Stefanie

Stefanie — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:06:05 +0000

I think social media will be a great asset in drawing more people to the field of science, too. In the past, a lot of scientific topics seemed isolated to the scientific and academic communities. Having forums, social bookmarking sites, chatrooms, and things like that should make it easier to get interested, easier to get help, and easier to stay interested over time.

I don’t know how it will work out for current working scientists, but I can say with some certainty that I would have definitely been more interested in the field had today’s online references and resources been available when I was in college.

By: Arpan Jhaveri

Arpan Jhaveri — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:15:21 +0000

At the same time I wonder how much of it is hype? … …But, will it end up as a lot of noise through which I’ll have to wade to reach the signal? How much faith should I put in some posting by someone I don’t know?

One of the benefits of web 2.0 tools / social networks, is that you need not worry about a posting by someone you don’t know. The web acts as an amplifier for reputation. Individuals who comment on a blog, for instance, have the option of linking their name back their website/blog/etc. The content from this associated link can, and at least in the technology world, provides reputation. It tells me who you are, what you are doing, and specifically what credentials you have.

If you don’t want to click to another site, then there are free commenting systems such as “IntenseDebate” and “Disqus” that have reputation management systems built in, to the point where it will display your photo alongside each comment you leave (provided you upload one of course), provide a score of your comments given by the participating community, and link to any online profiles (linkedin, facebook, flickr,etc) you want.

Sure this assumes that one willingly provides & links to such information – but from my experiences in the startup/technology world, everyone does. It’s brought greater transparency to the work being done and through IM (Skype, AIM, GTalk,etc) greatly facilitated discussions with individuals within my field who are internationally based. I didn’t know our author David Bradley 12 months ago, but his blog, which features his profile, and several conversations through Skype have told me everything I need to know.