24 april 2007
Social software approaches in science works
Scientists are just about getting their toes wet, testing the water when it comes to the application of social software such as wiki's or blogs. Let alone pod or vodcasts. There is some hesitation there, perhaps reluctance. Of course there are examples of blogs and wiki's in the scientific world, but they are scarce and deserve a lot of attention.
Communication in the scientific world takes place in journals. You can only enhance your career when you publish in the right journals and get cited -we are way passed the days of publish or perish-. Other ways of scientific communication haven't proven themselves sufficiently yet, so why would you invest in them.
I was struck therefore by a little gem of a letter by Osborne et al. in Nature last week. They compared the formal annotation of genes in OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) with those in GeneRif "which is like a miniature wiki where the author is restricted to a single short sentence" so they explain. They found "that GeneRIF already covers more than twice the number of diseases per gene and includes many more newly discovered mappings" and they conclude that "This seems to us to answer the scepticism that has been expressed about the expected community involvement in wiki collaborations." These kinds of results help to promote other ways enhancing science. Social software will possibly play a role in those new ways.
The original research of Osborne et al. has been published in an OA repository.
Reference:
Osborne, J. D., S. Lin and W. A. Kibbe (2007). Other riffs on cooperation are already showing how well a wiki could work. Nature 446(7138): 856-856. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/446856a (Subscription required)
Communication in the scientific world takes place in journals. You can only enhance your career when you publish in the right journals and get cited -we are way passed the days of publish or perish-. Other ways of scientific communication haven't proven themselves sufficiently yet, so why would you invest in them.
I was struck therefore by a little gem of a letter by Osborne et al. in Nature last week. They compared the formal annotation of genes in OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) with those in GeneRif "which is like a miniature wiki where the author is restricted to a single short sentence" so they explain. They found "that GeneRIF already covers more than twice the number of diseases per gene and includes many more newly discovered mappings" and they conclude that "This seems to us to answer the scepticism that has been expressed about the expected community involvement in wiki collaborations." These kinds of results help to promote other ways enhancing science. Social software will possibly play a role in those new ways.
The original research of Osborne et al. has been published in an OA repository.
Reference:
Osborne, J. D., S. Lin and W. A. Kibbe (2007). Other riffs on cooperation are already showing how well a wiki could work. Nature 446(7138): 856-856. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/446856a (Subscription required)
Labels: science, Social Software, wiki
