Science Intelligence and InfoPros

How lucky we are, a wonderful job has been done by Diane De De Dawson in the latest ISTL issue.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Open Science
Crowd Science
Methods and Scope
Open Science – Definitions and Principles
Open Science – Open Lab Notebooks of Individuals and Lab Groups
Open Science – Blogs
Crowd Science – Projects for Individuals or Small Teams
Crowd Science – Volunteer Distributed Computing Projects
The Main Software
Organizations
Selected Projects
Further Sources for Projects
Selected Examples of Collaborative Science Sites for Specialists
Main Software & Online Tools for Open Science
Open Science Conferences and Community
Conferences
Further Reading/Viewing
Videos
Declarations, Reports and White Papers
Open e-Books
Selected Essays, Articles, and Interviews
References

Dawson, Diane. Open Science and Crowd Science: Selected Sites and Resources. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. Spring 2012. Available from: http://www.istl.org/12-spring/internet2.html [Accessed 23 May 2012]

A commercial announcement by Swets:

“

Empowering libraries and delivering new tools to researchers:

Mendeley Institutional Edition Powered by Swets goes live

 Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) is for academic institutions and research groups, who want to provide improved services to researchers.  The MIE is a research service provided by libraries that improves the productivity of researchers, and gives the library the real-time visibility they need to continuously improve their services.  Unlike alternative products that only provide pieces of the solution, our service delivers clear value to both libraries and their customers.

The Mendeley Institutional Edition combines a premium version of the leading Mendeley research worktool, that gives the most productive integrated combination of reference management, research content discovery and collaboration; and give libraries the unique analytics that lets them connect content use with consequent research publications and the readership of these publications.  These analytics also help the library identify how to continuously improve their services. This is a cloud based real time platform.

“The success and continued rapid growth of Mendeley to date has already delivered a fantastic new tool for researchers” said David Main, CEO at Swets, “This new service delivered by libraries gives an premium service to researchers and gives libraries the conection to researchers and their activities that they need in this digital world”. 

Speaking of the launch, Victor Henning, Managing Director of Mendeley said, “With our cloud based tool, librarians will have a deeper visibility and understanding of their own content use and the impact of their research output. Mendeley Institutional Edition helps provide this and we’re delighted to be working with Swets to open up and increase the visibility of this data.  In addition, it will help them build private collaborative groups for their students, researchers and professors to network and share their knowledge.”

To learn more about Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets visit http://www.swets.com/mendeley-institutional-edition-features.”

Source: http://www.swets.com/empowering-libraries-and-delivering-new-tools-to-researchers-mendeley-institutional-edition-powered

Aaron Tay gives here an interesting vision of this still-promising tool:

“while looking at the features I finally grasped how powerful and disruptive a real and dominant “Facebook for researchers” is going to be. (…)

Of course, the road to such a goal has being strewn with many failures, including Elsevier’s 2collab , Labmeeting etc (check a report in 2008 of such tools and check how many still stands) and attempts have being or could be made from social bookmarking/reference management angle (e.g citeulike/Connotea/Mendeley),  Discovery/Search angle (potentially webscale discovery/next generation catalogues with social features) or  even more directly straight forward Identity management (e.g. ResearcherID).

But no matter who wins how would a dominant “Facebook for researchers” platform affect academic research and hence academic libraries? What areas would they disrupt? (..)

Disrupt search including webscale discovery tools

Mendeley , Citeulike etc are already starting to show hints of this, when you search you can see how many people put a certain article in their reference libraries, that itself could be a strong signal of quality. (…)

Currently Mendeley claims to have 150 million unique items (Jan 2012) when you search Mendeley , ”This makes it, according to Victor Henning, the company’s CEO and co-founder, the world’s largest research database.” (…)

Read more at:

Tay, Aaron. How a “Facebook for researchers” platform will disrupt almost everything. Musing about librarianship, April 18, 2012. Available at: http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-facebook-for-researchers-will.html [Accessed 18th 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

To support the launch of its Mendeley special edition, Swets has just released a subtile and very smart booklet that presents different challenges of the libraries in the digital age. It comes as well to define how social media have taken an important place into the research workflow.

“More and more students and researchers are turning to Mendeley to help facilitate their research. Mendeley’s unique, user-led research environment combines a powerful reference management tool with sophisticated social networking software. With more than 1.4 million active users, Mendeley has transformed the academic research landscape, creating new pathways for collaboration among students, professors and their peers around the world“.

A comparison table demonstrates how the collaborative and free tool Mendeley is equal or better than paying or free competitors (Endnote, Zotero, Refworks).

The white paper is free of charge:

Swets. White paper: Where is the library in the digital workflow of research? Research in the age of social media. 2012. 18 p.
http://www.swets.com//mendeley?sid=1215

for its customers.

Pres release:

Swets, the world’s leading information service company, and Mendeley, creators of the revolutionary online reference management and academic social networking tool, are pleased to announce the launch of Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets. Building on the existing Mendeley functionalities, this multi-device solution provides librarians and institutions with a means to:

• Connect their collection directly to researchers and end users
• Support researchers within their own workflow
• Create pathways for collaboration and interaction among students, professors and their peers
• Monitor, support and facilitate the research undertaken within their institution
• Showcase the value of their institution to potential students and research staff

With over 1.4 million active users Mendeley has quickly established itself as a must-have research tool among academic students, professors and researchers around the globe. It contains the world’s largest crowd-sourced information library, with over 145 million documents. Although the software has opened up new pathways for collaboration and interaction between individual students and researchers in similar fields around the world, those researchers could still benefit from the knowledge, guidance and expertise of the traditional library. MendeleyInstitutional Edition powered by Swets addresses this need, providing a unique operating place within the Mendeley platform from which librarians can guide, support and facilitate the research undertaken across their institution.

http://www.swets.com/setting-new-standards-in-research-collaboration-introducing-mendeley-institutional-edition-powered-b

See also:

http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=879

Haustein, Stefanie and Siebenlist, Tobias.
Applying social bookmarking data to evaluate journal usage. Journal of Informetrics. Article in Press, Corrected Proof.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2011.04.002

It has been shown that bookmarks of journal articles can be analyzed to measure journal usage independently from publishers. Data can be extracted about how often journal articles are used on a global scale. Tags assigned by users can give a new perspective on journal content and visualize trends of journal perception from the readers’ point of view.
By bookmarking and tagging articles, academic prosumers generate new information about resources, i.e. usage statistics and content description of scientific journals.
Given the lack of global download statistics, the authors propose the application of social bookmarking data to journal evaluation.

For a set of 45 physics journals all 13,608 bookmarks from CiteULike, Connotea and BibSonomy to documents published between 2004 and 2008 were analyzed.
This article explores bookmarking data in STM and examines in how far it can be used to describe the perception of periodicals by the readership.

Four basic indicators are defined, which analyze different aspects of usage: Usage Ratio, Usage Diffusion, Article Usage Intensity and Journal Usage Intensity. Tags are analyzed to describe a reader-specific view on journal content.

Social bookmarking in academics is however still in its infancy. Inconsistent and incomplete entries made retrieval cumbersome and a matching to other bibliographic data necessary. Metadata quality is crucial for the services to successfully keep old and gain new customers. So it was surprising to discover, that the entries were of bad quality…

 CiteULike also had the largest retrieval functionality and most complete metadata…
Mendeley looks like a suitable and applicable source for future usage-based journal evaluations.

As expected since July 2010 (see http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/tag/2collab/), the Elsevier social bookmarking service will be discontinued as from April 15, 2011.

Elsevier advices to migrate data to Mendeley or to RefWorks.

http://www.2collab.com/warning/