A "Facebook for Scientists"? It may sound silly, or redundant, but it's becoming more of a reality. Maybe.
A new startup based in Germany named ResearchGate has already convinced roughly 1.4 million researchers to become members and begin sharing. On it, you can search your email accounts to find people you know, read PDF documents of research papers, and chat with others about why a particular lab technique isn't working for you. Reportedly, the service is appealing to young researchers in their 20's.
None of this is particularly original. There have long been scientists on Facebook and LinkedIn and connecting via other websites like Scienceblogs. There have long been stores of PDF documents online, and searchable databases of them (particularly if you work at a university). There have long been job boards where you might find your next gig. And there have long been discussion boards or similar places where you could ask questions about lab techniques or which conference to attend this year.
The Economist writes about ResearchGate as if it's the only social network for scientists out there, but that's far from the case. Others have come before, and some are already gone. One that sounds somewhat similar was called Labmeeting; here, it's highlighted in a June 2008 post in TechCrunch, with a vast vision (co-founder Mark Kaganovich: "What we are trying to do is change the way information in biomedical research and the medical community is distributed and retrieved.") and a $500,000 seed round of funding from Peter Thiel and others. But Labmeeting.com no longer directs anywhere, and Crunchbase lists the fledgling company as in the "deadpool" as of 1/1/11.
It's not really clear what ResearchGate is doing that's fundamentally different than Labmeeting.
But the ecosystem seems even worse, because many others have tried and failed, or tried and not necessarily caught on, or tried and are much more like "science publication management software" than a social network where people openly share. They have names like Academia.edu, Laboratree, Mendeley, myExperiment, and Epernicus. Scitable.com was launched by the Nature Publishing Group in 2009 as "a social network for scientists and scholars" but it currently looks like... a very nice website, or extremely fancy blog -- which is fine in itself, but it's not a social network, not really. The National Institutes of Health was reportedly funding yet another social network for scientists; I'm not sure if it ever happened.
It's easy to measure total users or total PDF's uploaded or other metrics and claim some success. And we're not really picking on any particular social network effort here. But why haven't any of these platforms truly caught on in the scientific community? Fundamentally, it's because they are add-ons to "the way things get done" and not replacements for the way scientists work day-to-day or how their careers are judged (i.e., you don't get promoted for great science tweeting).
This story about Science 2.0 reminds me of a slightly older debate about Intelligence 2.0, whereby the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) built Intellipedia and other social tools with which analysts could collaborate in real time around information, data, breaking news across agencies and job descriptions. It sounds great, and there were users, mainly younger ones passionate about innovative tools and approaches. Here's a great video about "Living Intelligence," also known as Purple Intelligence (i.e., mixing red and blue) -- It's a great video, a vision of how intelligence analysis could be.
But at the end of the day, living intelligence is not the vision by which the IC operates, for the most part. The way that analysts are measured is not by how many edits they made on the wiki page for a town in Iraq, but rather by writing old-fashioned reports for their agency or other traditional tasks. The problem is that Intellipedia was an add-on to what their job was; not the way they did their primary job. That negative feedback loop is enough to ensure that the innovation of Intellipedia never really makes it past the "chasm of death."
The same is true of science, which I have some firsthand experience with (I have a Ph.D. in animal behavior genetics and did academic biology research for about a decade). The scientific community fundamentally operates under the notion that a peer-reviewed research paper published in a traditional research journal is the discrete end-product of a series of experiments aimed at testing one or more hypotheses. Anyone who has actually been a laboratory scientist knows that this is a complete farse; I need not even elaborate on why. Nevertheless, publishing such papers is the primary yardstick by which you are judged as a grad student, postdoctoral fellow, and professor, even at the more senior levels. On top of that, the same exact research published in a "good" journal vs. an "okay" journal is somehow emotionally different to the reader. The only reason why is perceived prestige of some publications vs. others regardless of actual long-term value of the research.
Social networks for scientists will face precisely the same challenges as those within the IC. These are two-fold. One, a culture of secrecy whereby the more "secret" information (vs. community / shared information) is perceived as more valuable. Two, a culture of discrete publications (vs. living knowledge and data sets) whereby people are primarily judged by traditional processes dating back, in the case of science, a couple hundred years. And while there are some well-intentioned, smart people discussing Science 2.0 and what it would take for that to happen, it is in my opinion extremely unlikely that the entire system of how academic science operates in the U.S. will change within the venture capital-backed funding cycle of one of the science social networking companies like ResearchGate.
From what people tell me, the IC is slowly changing. Certain individuals over a period of years have fought the good fight to change the workflow of intelligence analysts, leveraging new social technologies and making the work and the products more agile and indeed, "living." The full story is for another time, but the point is that it can happen. I know some of the individuals involved in the IC story, and their road has not been easy. The roadblocks thrown in their path have been significant. They traveled a very long, complicated path because they believed in a vision, a better way of doing things. But most importantly, they didn't just talk amongst themselves, but rather took the fight to the middle management of intelligence agencies, and to the senior leadership.
There are some voices like this in science, to some degree or another. Will they persevere against the system?
Follow Mark Drapeau on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cheeky_geeky
Although they keep some information "secret", they need to talk and discuss with fellow scientist. Scientists collaborate with each other even if they are from different universities?
How do they get to collaborate in the first place? How do they discover that each other exist?
One way is by reading papers, obviously. But they also meet each other at conferences or societies, where they promote their research and they network.
In this post, I describe three social media tools for the scientist 2.0. In it I explain that writing blogs and using social media or social networks is another way of promoting and sharing their research. Some share at an early stage what others keep "secret". Others just share finished results.
In any case, social networks can be a great way of knowing who is who and to have contact with each other.
This post captures how many academics view the journal system: they both love it and hate it at the same time. They hate it (Mark Drapeau above says it's a 'farce'), but also love it because they can't see a system that would replace it.
I think parts of it are already being replaced. E.g. discovery of research is now rarely driven by the the journal industry, but it used to be exclusively driven by the journal industry. Credit is still largely controlled by the journal industry, but I think that will change, just as research discovery has changed over the last 5-10 years.
I wouldn't be surprised if, in 5-10 years' time, the role of journals in accrediting research is as small as their role in driving research discovery now. I wrote a guest post on TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago, called "The Future of Peer Review", elaborating on some of these themes http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/05/the-future-of-peer-review/.
Secondly, if scientists are focused on solving a problem or trying to achieve an objective, the only reason why any scientist would be networking is to glean information from others. It is supported by the fact that, most websites which sport scientific papers and journals, like JSTOR, etc., gets used heavily, and certainly not querries to others on Facebook.
Third, most scientists, outside of academia, are usually employed by industry, and by governments, who may have control over their ability to either copyright, or patent, anything they may produce. They are subserveant to their company and/or government. So, it discourages them from sharing information that might cause either their commercial competition to gain an advantage, or in the case of government scientists, breaching national security and issues dealing with political scrutiny.
If one can design a network that overcomes these barriers, you will have achieved a good and credible science network.
Pretty much this......a "social network' that gives you research grants based on your paper count would have some promise....lol - that is why peer reviewed journals have all the power - get a paper in there and that juicy federal grant is yours........
because like so many other things - the only thing that matters is money - not novel research and sure as hell not being social.
I think one of the larger challenges that needs to be overcome at the same time and in a complimentary way is in addressing how work is funded. A common thread across the communities mentioned seems to be in how the work is tied to funding dollars. What could be done to change how work is recognized and funded? Do we focus on results? Or do we focus on work that is yielding more work while attaining a deeper understanding of the subject matter?
How does peer review of work in progress compete with the peer review of published findings? What would have to happen to have people join the conversation while it is happening, rather than when it is completed and documented?
How would one patent collaborative work? Do each of the companies that contributed to the collaborative work get a portion of the rights and proceeds? I think some of these issues will have to be approached and worked along side any effort to affect change in the direction of well intention-ed collaborative production efforts no matter which community attempts to apply it.
Cheers!
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Besides which, scientist email pdfs an comments about articles on arxiv and elsewhere.
http://arxiv.org/
It's worth remembering that the xxx domain name for arxiv preceded the www.
This structure lends itself to an atomic (or at least the illusion thereof) publication structure, where results can be framed in a narrative that motivates for other researchers (especially those that disagree with your framework for understanding) why what you're doing is important, and what are its key findings. This also ties into the fact that preparing something for public consumption means dotting the i's and crossing the t's on a huge number of minutiae that might non-obviously affect the quality of your results. Doing those stats not only takes a lot of time, but some of the needed tests don't become obvious until you've finalized a data set and spent weeks pouring over it.
Now this is, of course, all orthogonal to the nascent move away from proprietary publication and towards more collaboration between individuals at different institutions or in different fields. But I think for any 'scientific social network' to succeed, it needs to have a method for morphing useful informal discussions into formal publications (whether in open journals or elsewhere) as the discussion matures or settles to the point where snapshot can be taken.
First, there is a change going on in the culture of academic science, away from the proprietary peer-reviewed publication business and towards greater openness and collaboration. The "open science" movement is only a small step in this direction. Social sciences are moving fairly quickly in this direction, and also are moving quickly to "4th Paradigm" science (as Jim Gray at Microsoft put it), which is more amenable to data-sharing and open collaboration.
Second, you've got a serious problem of domain cultures. Biomedical researchers don't socialize the way that physicists, astronomers, or computer scientists socialize. Go to a AAAS meeting and you'll see the cultural divide in sharp relief. I'm very doubtful that a generic social network for scientists can thrive. In contrast, domain-specific social networks are turning out to be very useful.
A key success factor, which you didn't mention much, is the link to funding. In building a similar network, we always asked the question, "what would make a leading scientist want to spend time on this network rather than write the next $250K grant proposal?" It's hard to see how some of these social networks help scientists with their primary job, which (let's face it) is raising money for that next project. If you don't have research sponsors involved in the network, the utility diminishes dramatically.