Science Intelligence and InfoPros

If you’re not paying the for it, YOU are the product…

(http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product)

Source: http://www.demainlaveille.fr/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/july12.graphitix900.jpg

Below a digest of some discussions reported in 2 blogs:

• May 2009, Rest in peace RSS: It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. (…) Suddenly everyone and their dog was convinced RSS was dead and we should all move on.
• In early 2011 RSS still wasn’t quite dead. (…) To me, anytime someone says a tech is dead it usually means that tech is not very interesting to discuss anymore, or isn’t seeing the most innovative companies doing new things with it.
• April 2012 – RSS still wasn’t quite dead (…) There’s a veritable explosion of companies removing RSS from their products … for whatever reason. Usually because it doesn’t directly benefit the bottom line – they prefer proprietary formats
• RSS will never die because of a simple reality: power users. (…) RSS is here to stay for at least a while longer – all those people doing most of the sharing? A lot of their stuff comes from RSS.
• Twitter is not a replacement for RSS. Not by a long shot. It’s too busy! (…) Consequently, RSS offers bigger exposure to your content.
• Twitter seems to be the place to have conversations now rather then on blogs. That’s not to say blogs don’t have a place in both finding information and having discussions, but it would appear they’re being used for more reflective posts, which individuals can comment on, rather then short conversations involving lots of individuals

Teller, Swizec. RSS will never die. Zemanta Tech blog, April 26, 2012. Available from: http://www.zemanta.com/fruitblog/rss-will-never-die/ [Accessed 4th of May 2012]

Mulla, James. The role of RSS and RSS readers. FUMSI, 30th of April 2012. Available from: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/manage/68689 [Accessed 4th of May 2012]

From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0:

Semantic search and social media in the pharmaceutical industry and STM publishing

Hervé Basset, Science Intelligence, France, David Stuart, King’s College London, UK and Denise Silber, BASIL Strategies & Doctors 2.0 TM & You, France

Chandos Publishing Social Media Series No. 7

- gives a global overview of success and failure in Science 2.0
- presents useful stories and lessons learned
- gives a clear view of how semantic search is present in science platforms and its potential in STM publishing
- offers realistic perspectives written by experts in contact with research and medical communities

Science 2.0 uses the resources of Web 2.0 to communicate between scientists, and with the general public. Web 3.0, in turn, has brought disruptive technologies such as semantic search, cloud computing and mobile applications into play. The term Pharma 3.0 anticipates the future relationship between drug makers and doctors with their patients in light of such technology. From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0 examines these developments, discussing the best and worst of Web 2.0 in science communication and health. Successes such as the Open Access phenomena and also less successful networks are covered. This title is divided into three parts. The first part considers the Web 2.0 revolution, and the promise of its impact on science communication and the state of Science 2.0. The second part looks at impact on Pharma and Health, including attempts to utilise digital in Pharma. The last part looks at the promising disruptive technologies of Web 3.0, including semantic search in biomedicine and enterprise platforms. The book concludes by looking forward to developments of ‘3.0’ in Pharma and STM publishing.

Readership: Those interested in Science 2.0 and Pharma 3.0., including researchers, information professionals, and managers.

ISBN 1 84334 709 1
ISBN-13: 978 1 84334 709 5
To be published in August 2012

http://www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/book.aspx?bookID=2767&ChandosTitle=1

Social media versus social business

The biggest difference between social media and social business is that social media tools provide the platform and the technologies that people use to communicate and create content. Social media is usually used to describe technologies used outside of an organisation by individuals such asTwitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social business on the other hand is the process and result of optimising internal business processes using social media tools. Social business also means applying social concepts and technology internally to create collaboration, sharing, innovation and engagement opportunities. Creating a social business usually means applying social media tools to business processes, but it’s not a requirement, an organisation can be described as being social without necessarily using social media tools.

Mullan, James. Jumping on the social business bandwagon. FUMSI, 24th of April 2012. Available from: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/68638 [Accessed 26th of April 2012]

“Here at Comprendia, we’ve never advocated that Facebook should be recreated for scientists, as there are 700,000+ life science graduates in the US already using the application,* and they are likely already connected there to lab mates and colleagues. Rather, we should broaden our idea of the ‘social network’ to include any online community of scientists, not just those which are similar to Facebook. The value of social networks for scientists lies in faster access to information relevant to their research and the communities that are made more available by new tools. Here are 6 successful examples which can be used to understand scientific social communities. (…)

1. Facebook Pages & LinkedIn Groups. Scientists have used mailing lists and forums for years. Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups are a ’2.0′ version of them with the benefits of centralization and easier access to participants. Life science companies, most notably Life Technologies, have fostered social networks in the form of Facebook pages centered on a topic.
2. Twitter Hashtags. Scientists use Twitter to share scientific blog posts and news, to find friends and colleagues around a topic or event, and sometimes to vent about their situation. Hashtags, which are text identifiers for status updates on a topic, allow a Twitter social network to form around it…
3. ScienceOnline
4. True Social Networks. (…) ResearchGate’s has 1.4 million users, as we know that scientists don’t have time for frivolous endeavors, especially when they’re under the watchful eye of their Principal Investigator. As we noted in our post a year ago, there has to be a value for them to participate, and the successful ones center around research publications. BiomedExperts, CiteULike, ResearchBlogging, andResearchGate had the highest traffic in our quick study, and they all rely heavily on publications. I like to say that PubMed was the first social network for scientists.
5. Publication Sharing/Open Access. Related to the last point is a subject that requires its own mention as it transverses from proper social networks to desktop applications, Twitter, and even a movement to make research publications more accessible.Mendeley is the rock star of the publication sharing/open access genre, boasting 1.77 million users who are sharing 169 million publications. When we speak with life scientists at conferences or client visits, we often hear about the application even from those who are not strong believers in social media. Additionally, these applications have whetted scientists’ appetites for more open access to publications
6. Blogs.  “blogs were one of the first forms of social media for scientists.”  Blog aggregators such as ResearchBlogging orScienceSeeker feature hundreds of blogs and likely a comparable number of communities focused around individual research topics.

Tools for social networking and social awareness are developing rapidly and evolving continuously. They are gaining popularity in a growing number of professional as well as personal activities, including scholarly research. There are social awareness tools for science researchers that facilitate collaboration, help manage references, and offer options for presenting findings in new ways.

Social tools can be broken down into two main types: social networking and social awareness. In this paper, we define social networking tools as those that build upon people, and social awareness tools as those that build upon data. Social networking tools allow a user to connect with others and utilize these connections to create networks. Social awareness tools, on the other hand, allow one to see or manipulate data about people, such as co-authorship networks. They allow the researcher to become aware of new social connections through the ability to view and combine data in different ways. These tools, however, are not mutually exclusive. A social tool that combines both social networking and social awareness elements provides a powerful framework for advancing research.

Mendeley is an online service along the lines of Facebook or Flickr designed to help researchers manage and share their PDF files. Public collections share reading lists and associated metadata with the world at large. Smaller shared collections can include the full-text PDF articles. The creators attempted to mimic the music service Last.fm, which allows users to catalog their music, but at the same time anonymously aggregate data about listening preferences. Similarly, Mendeley was designed to create a way to help manage academic papers and anonymously track reading habits to show trends such as popular papers and key researchers within the various communities. By aggregating metadata, tags, and usage, Mendeley hopes to become an alternative to pay-walled databases.

SciVee is a website where researchers, students and educators can upload and share their published scientific articles (including posters and slides) and integrate them into a video called a “PubCast”, which allows authors to discuss and highlight the important points of their published articles (displayed next to the video) while relevant text or figures synchronously appear. The PubCast (essentially a multimedia presentation) is a dynamic form of communication specifically designed to engage its viewer. It gives the researcher higher content information than an abstract, requires just a few minutes to read, and requires much less time than reading a full scientific article, which can take several hours.  More importantly, with the PubCast’s design having more visual appeal than an article alone, a greater interest in the article by way of increased views and downloads is generated.  As a social awareness tool, SciVee provides the researcher with a multimedia presentation that makes scientific content more accessible, engaging and even more enjoyable, while also providing a quicker means to view the work of other scientists and to form collaborations. From a scientific standpoint, this makes it a considerably more desirable tool than the more mainstream social networking sites such as YouTube.  The developers of SciVee predict that today’s generation of graduate and post-doc student scientists will help to incite a “revolution in scientific communication“, …

Tamara M. McMahon; James E. Powell, Matthew Hopkins, Daniel A. Alcazar, Laniece E. Miller and Linn Collins, Ketan K. Mane. Social Awareness Tools for Science Research. D-Lib Magazine, Vol.18, N°3/4, March/April 2012.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march12/03contents.html#article4

UPDATED ON 6th of March 2012:

As part of Google’s prioritization of product efforts, we will be retiring Knol.  From now through April 30th, 2012, Knol will work as usual, but we’ve made it easy for you to download your knols to file and/or export them to WordPress.com.  From May 1, 2012 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported.  After that time, knol content will no longer be accessible

https://knol-redirects.appspot.com/faq.html

KNOL, the Google attempt, a long forgotten Wikipedia competitor, will be shutting down soon…

According:
http://mashable.com/2011/11/22/google-wave-knol-and-gears-headed-for-retirement-video/

Google blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html

For previous posts on KNOL, see:

http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/tag/knol/

http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/a-piece-of-knowledge-by-google/

70% of organisations in the Western world have adopted SharePoint. Is the organisation you work in one of those, or are you one of the 30% who are still considering whether SharePoint is a tool that you could use?

Read further: Mullan, James. SharePoint 2010 do’s and don’ts. FUMSI, 21st of February, 2012.

http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/manage/66603 

By Mark Drapeau, in the Huffington Post, about Research Gate, and the social networks for Scientists in general.

“A “Facebook for Scientists”? It may sound silly, or redundant, but it’s becoming more of a reality. Maybe. (…)

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. (…)

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. (…)

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. (…)

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. (…)

Drapeau, Mark. Social Networks for Scientists Won’t Work. The Huffington Post, 17th of February 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-drapeau/social-networks-for-scientists_b_1282692.html

To read in Information Today Europe:

For the last five years the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research has been conducting a study about the use of social media in the 500 fastest growing organisations in the US (The Inc. 500.)  The first study, conducted in 2007, found that these companies were much more likely to have adopted blogs than those in the ‘traditional’ Fortune 500.

The latest findings show that the use of blogging in the Inc. 500 companies is declining for the first time. Blogging had declined to 37% from 50% in 2010. (…)

However, as blogging reaches maturity in these organisations, the use of other social media, including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Mobile apps, texting, Twitter and YouTube, is growing.  74% of responding companies were using Facebook, and 73% using LinkedIn. (…)

Read further:

Val Skelton, A blog post about the decline of blogging. Information Today Europe Blog, 2nd of February 2012.

http://www.infotodayeurope.com/2012/02/02/a-blog-post-about-the-decline-of-blogging/