The Research Information Network has put out a cal for expressions of interest in running a research project on how Web 2.0 tools are changing scientific practice. The project will be funded up to £90,000. Expressions of interest are due on Monday 3 November (yes next week) and the projects are due to start in January. You can see the call in full here but in outline RIN seeking evidence whether web 2.0 tools are:

• making data easier to share, verify and re-use, or otherwise

facilitating more open scientific practices;

• changing discovery techniques or enhancing the accessibility of

research information;

• changing researchers’ publication and dissemination behaviour,

(for example, due to the ease of publishing work-in-progress and

grey literature);

• changing practices around communicating research findings (for

example through opportunities for iterative processes of feedback,

pre-publishing, or post-publication peer review).

Now we as a community know that there are cases where all of these are occurring and have fairly extensively documented examples. The question is obviously one of the degree of penetration. Again we know this is small – I’m not exactly sure how you would quantify it.

My challenge to you is whether it would be possible to use the tools and community we already have in place to carry out the project? In the past we’ve talked a lot about aggregating project teams and distributed work but the problem has always been that people don’t have the time to spare. We would need to get some help from social scientists on process and design of the investigation but with £90,000 there is easily enough money to pay people properly for their time. Indeed I know there are some people out there freelancing already who are in many ways already working on these issues anyway. So my question is: Are people interested in pursuing this? And if so, what do you think your hourly rate is?

Posted: October 28th, 2008 under web2.
Comments: 5

A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement:

I would add that in my opinion Cameron’s points about FriendFeed apply also to Nature Network. I’ve seen lots of examples of highly specific questions being answered on NN in the way Cameron describes for FF…But NN and FF aren’t the same: they both have the same nice feature of discussion of a partiular question or “article at a URL somewhere”, but they differ in other ways,…[CN- my emphasis]

Alright, in isolation this doesn’t look like much, read through both David’s post and the comments, and then come back to Maxine’s,  but what struck me was that on many of these sites many different communities seem to be using very different functionality to do very similar things. In Maxine’s words ‘…discussion of a…paricular URL somewhere…’ And that leads me to wonder the extent to which all of these sites are failing to do what it is that we actually want them to do. And the obvious follow on question: What is it we want them to do?

There seem to be two parts to this. One, as I wrote in my response to David, is that a lot of this is about the coffee room conversation, a process of building and maintaining a social network. It happens that this network is online, which makes it tough to drop into each others office, but these conversational tools are the next best thing. In fact they can be better because they let you choose when someone can drop into your office, a choice you often don’t have in the physical world. Many services; Friendfeed, Twitter, Nature Networks, Faceboo, or a combination can do this quite well - indeed the conversation spreads across many services helping the social network (which bear in mind probably actually has less than 500 total members) to grow, form, and strengthen the connections between people.

Great. So the social bit, the bit we have in common with the general populace, is sorted. What about the science?

I think what we want as scientists is two things. Firstly we want the right URL delivered at the right time to our inbox (I am assuming anything important is a resource on the web - this may not be true now but give it 18 months and it will be) . Secondly we want a rapid and accurate assessment of this item, its validity, its relevance, and its importance to us judged by people we trust and respect. Traditionally this was managed by going to the library and reading the journals - and then going to the appropriate conference and talking to peopl. We know that the volume of material and the speed at which we need to deal with this is way too fast. Nothing new there.

My current thinking is that we are failing in building the right tools because we keep thinking of these two steps as separate when actually combining them into one integrated process would actual provide efficiency gains for both phases. I need to sleep on this to get it straight in my head, there are issues of resource discovery, timeframes, and social network maintenance that are not falling into place for me at the moment, so that will be the subject of another post.

However, whether I am right or wrong in that particular line of thought, if it is true that we are reasonably consistent in what we want then it is not suprising that we try to bend the full range of services available into achieving those goals. The interesting question is whether we can discern what the killer app would be by looking at the details of what people do to different services and where they are failing. In a sense, if there is a single killer app for science then it should be discernable what it would do based on what scientists try to do with different services…

Posted: September 27th, 2008 under Fb4Sci, web2.
Comments: 6

So Ian Mulvaney asked, and as my solution did not fit into the margin I thought I would post here. Following on from the two rants of a few weeks back and many discussions at Scifoo I have been thinking about how scientists might be persuaded to make more use of social web based tools. What does it take to get enough people involved so that the network effects become apparent. I had a discussion with Jamie Heywood of Patients Like Me at Scifoo because I was interested as to why people with chronic diseases were willing to share detailed and very personal information in a forum that is essentially public. His response was that these people had an ongoing and extremely pressing need to optimise as far as is possible their treatment regime and lifestyle and that by correlating their experiences with others they got to the required answers quicker. Essentially successful management of their life required rapid access to high quality information sliced and diced in a way that made sense to them and was presented in as efficient and timely a manner as possible. Which obviously left me none the wiser as to why scientists don’t get it….

Nonetheless there are some clear themes that emerge from that conversation and others looking at uptake and use of web based tools. So here are my 5 thoughts. These are framed around the idea of reference management but the principles I think are sufficiently general to apply to most web services.

1. Any tool must fit within my existing workflows. Once adopted I may be persuaded to modify or improve my workflow but to be adopted it has to fit to start with. For citation management this means that it must have one click filing (ideally from any place I might find an interesting paper)  but will also monitor other means of marking papers by e.g. shared items from Google reader, ‘liked’ items on Friendfeed, or scraping tags in del.icio.us.
2. Any new tool must clearly outperform all the existing tools that it will replace in the relevant workflows without the requirement for network or social effects. Its got to be absolutely clear on first use that I am going to want to use this instead of e.g. Endnote. That means I absolutely have to be able to format and manage references in a word processor or publication document. Technically a nightmare I am sure (you’ve got to worry about integration with Word, Open Office, GoogleDocs, Tex) but an absolute necessity to get widespread uptake. And this has to be absolutely clear the first time I use the system, before I have created any local social network and before you have a large enough user base for theseto be effective.
3. It must be near 100% reliable with near 100% uptime. Web services have a bad reputation for going down. People don’t trust their network connection and are much happier with local applications still. Don’t give them an excuse to go back to a local app because the service goes down. Addendum - make sure people can easily backup and download their stuff in a form that will be useful even if your service dissappears. Obviously they’ll never need to but it will make them feel better (and don’t scrimp on this because they will check if it works).
4. Provide at least one (but not too many) really exciting new feature that makes people’s life better. This is related to #2 but is taking it a step further. Beyond just doing what I already do better I need a quick fix of something new and exciting. My wishlist for Connotea is below.
5. Prepopulate. Build in publically available information before the users arrive. For a publications database this is easy and this is something that BioMedExperts got right. You have a pre-existing social network and pre-existing library information. Populate ‘ghost’ accounts with a library that includes people’s papers (doesn’t matter if its not 100% accurate) and connections based on co-authorships. This will give people an idea of what the social aspect can bring and encourage them to bring more people on board.

So that is so much motherhood and applepie. And nothing that Ian didn’t already know (unlike some other developers who I shan’t mention). But what about those cool features? Again I would take a back to basics approach. What do I actually want?

Well what I want is a service that will do three quite different things. I want it to hold a library of relevant references in a way I can search and use and I want to use this to format and reference documents when I write them. I want it to help me manage the day to day process of dealing with the flood of literature that is coming in (real time search). And I want it to help me be more effective when I am researching a new area or trying to get to grips with something (offline search). Real time search I think is a big problem that isn’t going to be solved soon. The library and document writing aspects I think are a given and need to be the first priority. The third problem is the one that I think is amenable to some new thinking.

What I would really like to see here is a way of pivoting my view of the literature around a specific item. This might be a paper, a dataset, or a blog post. I want to be able to click once and see everything that item cites, click again and see everything that cites it. Pivot away from that to look at what GoPubmed thinks the paper is about and see what it has which is related and then pivot back and see how many of those two sets are common. What are the papers in this area that this review isn’t citing? Is there a set of authors this paper isn’t citing? Have they looked at all the datasets that they should have? Are there general news media items in this area, books on Amazon, books in my nearest library, books on my bookshelf? Are they any good? Have any of my trusted friends published or bookmarked items in this area? Do they use the same tags or different ones for this subject? What exactly is Neil Saunders doing looking at that gene? Can I map all of my friends tags onto a controlled vocabulary?

Essentially I am asking for is to be able to traverse the graph of how all these things are interconnected. Most of these connections are already explicit somewhere but nowhere are they all brought together in a way that the user can slice and dice them the way they want. My belief is that if you can start to understand how people use that graph effectively to find what they want then you can start to automate the process and that that will be the route towards real time search that actually works.

…but you’ll struggle with uptake…

Posted: August 19th, 2008 under Fb4Sci, authoring tools, connotea, search, sharing, social networks, web2.
Comments: none

My aim is to email this to all the email addresses that I can find on the relevant sites over the next week or so, but feel free to diffuse more widely if you feel it is appropriate.

Dear Developer(s)

I am writing to ask your support in undertaking a critical analysis of the growing number of tools being developed that broadly fall into the category of social networking or collaborative tools for scientists. There has been a rapid proliferation of such tools and significant investment in time and effort for their development. My concern, which I wrote about in a recent blog post (here), is that the proliferation of these tools may lead to a situation where, because of a splitting up of the potential user community, none of these tools succeed.

One route forward is to simply wait for the inevitable consolidation phase where some projects move forward and others fail. I feel that this would be missing an opportunity to critically analyse the strengths and weaknesses of these various tools, and to identify the desirable characteristics of a next generation product. To this end I propose to write a critical analysis of the various tools, looking at architecture, stability, usability, long term funding, and features. I have proposed some criteria and received some comments and criticisms of these. I would appreciate your views on what the appropriate criteria are and would welcome your involvement in the process of writing this analysis. This is not meant as an attack on any given service or tool, but as a way of getting the best out of the development work that has already taken place, and taking the opportunity to reflect on what has worked and what has not in a collaborative and supportive fashion.

I will also be up front and say that I have an agenda on this. I would like to see a portable and agreed data model that would enable people to utilise the best features of all these services without having to rebuild their network within each site. This approach is very much part of the data portability agenda and would probably have profound implications for the design architecture of your site. My feeling, however, is that this would be the most productive architectural approach. It does not mean that I am right of course and I am prepared to be convinced otherwise if the arguments are strong.

I hope you will feel free to take part in this exercise and contribute. I do believe that if we take a collaborative approach then it will be possible to identify the features and range of services that the community needs and wants. Please comment at the blog post or request access to the GoogleDoc where we propose to write up this analysis.

Yours sincerely,

Cameron Neylon

Posted: August 6th, 2008 under Fb4Sci, social networks, tools, web2.
Comments: 9