The idea that the Internet might be used for scientific collaboration shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since the Web's predecessor was originally created as a way to connect researchers at different institutions so they could solve problems together.
That said, however, collaboration has accelerated over the past several years, thanks in part to the increasing popularity of social media, or Web 2.0 tools, which have collectively lowered the barriers to online interaction for scientific researchers.
A number of social networks and services devoted specifically to scientific research have sprung up and are growing quickly, including one called Mendeley. An online collaboration tool, it allows scientists and researchers to upload research papers, which the software combs through, looking for bibliographic data (author, title, etc.). These are then matched with any other research that already exists in the database.
"You can just drag and drop your collection of PDFs into the software and it'll automatically extract all the bibliographic data -- all of the stuff that you'd usually have to type in manually," co-founder Victor Henning told the BBC. "What Mendeley is designed to do is give you recommendations which compliment your existing library."
The software has become popular with some scientists at highly ranked research institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, and Cambridge, and Henning says the service has about 70,000 users and is growing at a rate of 40 percent every month.
Many scientists from different disciplines have also adopted the "open-source" model favored by the Linux free software movement and supporters of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia. Project Polymath, for example, uses blogs and wikis to allow people to collaborate on solving complex mathematical problems.
In one instance, cancer researchers turned up a solution to a knotty bio-information problem in less than two months. Polymath participants "had worked out an elementary proof, and a manuscript describing the proof is currently being written," Walter Jessen, a bioinformatician and cancer biologist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, told LinuxInsider. "The project demonstrated that many people could work together to solve difficult mathematical problems."
Another open-source science project is Bizarro's Bioinformatics Organization, which started in 1998 and uses wiki software to let researchers post models, questions, experiments, and discoveries related to biology and "informatics." Scientists were "looking for a central location for their open source projects," founder Jeff Bizarro told LinuxInsider. Today, the organization has 27,000 members from all around the world.
If Bizarro is like Facebook or Wikipedia, a collaborative network called ResearchGate has aspects that are similar to LinkedIn, the corporate social network. While the service allows scientists to search for and connect research done by others to their own work in order to see patterns or relationships that are worth following, it also allows scientists to create profiles and search for relationships with other researchers in similar or related disciplines.
ResearchGate, which has 180,000 members, says it wants to create something called "Science 2.0" using social media tools. According to the group's Website, "communication between scientists will accelerate the distribution of new knowledge. Without anonymous review processes, the concept of open-access journals will assure research quality. Science is collaboration, so scientific social networks will facilitate and improve the way scientists collaborate."
Some scientists are using even newer tools to collaborate -- including Google Wave, the new tool launched by the search giant that some describe as a combination of email, instant messaging, and a wiki.
"Google Wave offers two specific things," Cameron Neylon, senior scientist at Britain's Science and Technology Facilities Council, told the BBC. "What it looks like is this cross of e-mail and instant-messaging, which is great fun. Where it really wins for science is that actually these documents or 'Waves' can be made automated so we can connect up documents and ideas with each other." The power lies in allowing scientists to share a range of objects, he says, from pictures and text to raw data.
Will these new social tools help produce any penicillin or DNA-type breakthroughs? Scientists and researchers who use them say it's just a matter of time.
— Mathew Ingram, technology writer for The Globe and Mail in Canada
This is a great development. You raise good points, viboons, in the distinction between the proprietary and commercialization of ideas and the broader social value. I think there is a place for both.
But these sights are great. This should advance the innovation in the web, its application to a wide variety of problems. The collaboration that comes through sharing is a critical piece to ongoing innovation.
Maybe that is where the next big break-through will come, Mary.
As we can see now, social media plays an important role on online sources, and also Science 2.0. I think this is such an encouraging post for that many documents or researches will be shared to others in all over the world via these project management tools. So, accessibility will be possibly made in an easy ways.
My point wasn't an indictment against collaborating. It was a statement about IT shops.
Generally (and I know I'm generalizing, hence "generally), when collaborative apps begin being used, there comes an IT reason (security, bandwidth, potential for inappropriate content, etc.) that shuts it down.
I liken the IT administrators of today to Circuit City sales persons of yesterday, who would sell you on the features and reliability of an appliance and then, once you decided to buy it, tell you why it will fail and why you need a service plan. Similarly, as IT shops were being built, they were built for the growing needs of users who now find this same group telling them they can't use the technology.
Although, if they use the tools as they should, they probably will eventually be prohibited from collaborating
Read How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife? And Other Meditations on Management by Stephen S. McIntosh. He makes a compelling case that competition at the expense of collaboration actually inhibits progress in both business and academia. He even reveals that he will fail a student who refuses to help other students with an assignment. His point is that competition for the sake of ego drives the counter-productive politicking, back-stabbing, and scheming that eats up temporal, monetary, and intellectual resources, causes duplication of effort, and leads to dead end goals that serve only to aggrandize their promoters.
More collaboration, and less ego-centric competition helps organizations solve problems and make everyone succeed. I'm looking forward to what unforseen products these open collaboration tools may help develop - imagine how much wasted time and effort could have been avoided if the East Anglia Climate Research Unit had shared their research openly with other researchers? Instead of wasting energy manipulating data to protect foregone conclusions, additional minds from all around the world could have contributed to understanding them.
Given the availability of research sites like these, have any of you readers encountered projects you think are particularly promising for the evolution of the Web?
Matt, Thanks for the very enlightening blog. Without sounding too ignorant or dating myself, can people like George Castanza from Seinfeld fame ever realize his true ambition to become a marine biologist by accessing these sites? Or are they closed only to the scientific community?
I'm a proponent of collaboration, but I also understand that competition can be an essential part as well in almost any great scientific discoveries. We wouldn't have today's comprehensive understanding of the nature of temperature if it weren't for the historical race of the "absolute zero" research. If there were extensive collaboration at the time modern Calculus was discovered, we wouldn't have to argue so much about whether it's Newton or Leibniz who first "invented" calculus. But it turned out that because of the lack of sharing and competition to try to be the best, both Newton and Leibniz (and mathematicians like Bernoulli) contributed different aspects/styles of calculus, which made it more complete. That said, Web 2.0 oriented collaboration should benifit the scientific communities more often than not - in addition to a more traditional collaboration such as peer review...
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