Bad story: J&J unit closes a Facebook page

According Pharmalot:

“More than a year after launching its Psoriasis 360 page on Facebook, the Janssen UK unit of Johnson & Johnson is closing down due to a growing number of comments that had to be removed because specific drugs were mentioned or, in some cases, offensive language was used.  (…)

The move comes amid an ongoing debate over the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry can – and should – embrace Facebook and, in general, social media. Last year, Facebook no longer allowed drugmakers to disable posted comments…

In fact, the Psoriasis 360 Facebook page was the first in the pharmaceutical industry to allow comments to appear before being vetted by a drugmaker (…)

Read further:

Silverman, Ed. J&J unit closes Facebook page due to comments. PharmaLot, 22nd of March 2012; Available from:
http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/03/jj-unit-closes-facebook-page-due-to-comments/

 

 

 

 

FDA guidelines for off-label information: a nice summary by SERMO

Gives a good approach of what could be a future guideline for sollicitated information about approved products

Values of Social Network for Scientists (by Comprendia)

“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.

(…)

At conferences and networking events today, we are seeing a transition, albeit slowly, to a new breed of scientists who understand the importance of scientific networks. We need to adjust our definition of scientific social networks to understand the next steps towards helping scientists use them to thrive.

What Is A Scientific Social Network? 6 Thriving and Inspiring Examples
Comprendia, March 12th, 2012

iPads and Health 2.0: a revolution?

A good summuary by Medical News Today:

Apple’s iPad is increasingly finding use in health and medicine, with applications ranging from giving individuals instant access to a wealth of reference, educational and personal health information, to helping hospitals streamline their operations, reduce labor costs, improve efficiency, and helping health professionals with analysis and diagnosis.

However, recent reports suggest the touch tablet devices could be doing more than was originally intended, driven by a pressure for change that is is coming from users, as health care providers seize the new tool with renewed passion, and demand more from the technologists.

Some business cases:

• iPads in Hospitals: Some hospitals have installed kiosks where patients, visitors and medical staff use the securely mounted touchscreen tablet to look up information
• iPads in Medical Education: Another environment that seems to have taken the iPad to its bosom is medical education. At first it was just a tool that students brought with them of their own initiative: but more and more medical schools are now switching to iPad as the main platform for delivering the curriculum.
• iPad’s Top Medical Apps: an impressive app is Medscape Mobile, a huge free resource from WebMD and available on several platforms, including iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and Blackberry. It is the leading medical resource most used by healthcare professionals. “The amount of free content provided by Medscape is absolutely mind boggling and seems to continuously grow with each update. 7,000+ drug references, 3,500+ disease clinical references, 2,500+ clinical images and procedure videos, robust drug interaction tool checker, CME activities, and more.”
• iPads in Medical Imaging: Medical imaging is a field where one can see how the iPad may one day, and perhaps that day is sooner rather than later, go beyond helping teachers, students patients and doctors communicate more clearly, to being a diagnostic tool.
• The new iPad
• What next?

 

Paddock, Catharine. iPads in Health and medicine: more than an information Revolution? Medical News Today, 14th of March 2012, Available from:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/242843.php [Accessed 21st of March 2012]

Social awareness tools for Science research: Mendeley and SciVee

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

When we use social media tools we add value to the technology (Prof. Hazel Hall)

Human behaviours endure beyond technology. (…)

People want to belong to a community, share questions and ideas and engage with each other and how they use tools to enable this is an infinitely interesting area of research.

Read more about the research being undertaken by Edinburgh Napier University’s Centre for Soial Informatics here.  You can read more about Hazel Hall here and access the slides from her publications pagehere.

http://www.infotoday.eu/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Whats-so-social-about-informatics-81376.aspx

 

 

Big STM: the market is still growing

Publishing forecast firm Simba Information, US, has released a report titled Global Professional Publishing 2010-2011.

According to the report, the global market for professional publishing products and services, led by the legal, science/technical and medical (STM) segments, will grow 3 percent through 2012, reaching $41.4 billion. The report further says print and electronic books were the leading delivery method, closely followed by online services and abstracting/indexing.

Print books still dominate the landscape for professional publishing, representing the largest chunk of revenue from the top 10 leading publishers. Additionally, the report finds double-digit growth for e-books. Mobile and Internet applications have also experienced significant growth recently, as publishers have stepped up production efforts.

http://www.simbainformation.com/about/release.asp?id=2643

Companies are neglecting Facebook

Surprising results of a recent study:

• Businesses are failing to get to grips with Facebook, according to research. Analysis of 1.7 million Facebook pages categorised across business, personal brands and interest groups, reveals that businesses have the lowest engagement rates and are ‘less social overall’. 
• Businesses are failing to optimize fan engagement and interactions due to a lack of basic education of platform familiarity and fan/page analytics
• 82% of Facebook pages have fewer than five posts a month, local business pages have the fewest; local business do not participate in 94% of conversations on their page and 91% of conversations on company pages are left unattended

According: IWR news desk, Information World Review 12/03/2012.
http://www.iwr.co.uk/social-media/3011248/Business-failing-the-Facebook-test

STM eBooks: promise and challenges after 5 formative years of experimentation

An interesting white paper, sponsored by Springer, where 5 consultants give their conclusions after first years of experimentation.

“eBooks have evolved considerably over the last fi ve years, beyond the more mature, but less dynamic eJournals space. Th ey are now poised at an intersection of library, technology and research trends that afford great opportunities and challenges, for both the library and publisher communities.

Similar to the formative years of STM eJournals adoption, eBook uptake shows both promise and challenges:promise as an efficient source for research, and challenges as stakeholders grasp how best to manage this relatively new content format.

In their sixth year, eBooks are entering an Age of Experimentation… (…)

Content:

• In Their Infancy: eBooks Helped Librarians and Researchers Work Smarter, But…
• eBooks Today: As Many Questions as There Are Answers
• eBooks Tomorrow: A Bright, If Uncertain, Future

Read the white paper at:

http://www.springer.com/ebooks

 

 

After Google Wave, KNOL to be discontinued

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:

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

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