Takuya Homma's Bookmarks tagged science2.0 →  View Popular

For example, OpenWetWare.org started out in 2005 as Endipedia, a website that scientists in Drew Endy and Tom Knight's labs at MIT used to share information. But today the website is backed by a National Science Foundation grant, and more than 4,000 biologists and bioengineers from across the world have signed up to share techniques, get practical tips, and even detail their day-to-day work if they choose.

Science Commons, a nonprofit group based at MIT, works to Web-enable the scientific enterprise by working on other aspects of openness: trying to find ways to make inaccessible journals broadly available and developing Internet tools to ease sharing of information.

Typically, scientists have stacks of papers, protocols, and notes in their offices that they pass around as PDFs. Labmeeting is designed first and foremost as a document management site that allows scientists and students to easily upload all of those PDFs, organize them, search them, and share them. Scientsist can create groups, and invite other members of their labs to create a common repository of papers that can be accessed from anywhere. The PDFs appear inside an embedded Scribd window (Kinsey Hills is also an investor in Scribd).

What we are trying to do is change the way information in biomedical research and the medical community is distributed and retrieved.

Of course, for many members of Bracher’s primary audience—young scientists still struggling to get tenure—those discussions can look like a minefield. A fair number of the participants use pseudonyms out of fear that a comment might offend some professor’s sensibilities, hurting a student’s chances of getting a job later. Other potential participants never get involved because they feel that time spent with the online community is time not spent on cranking out that next publication. “The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion,” PLoS ONE’s Surridge says. “Scientists don’t blog because they get no credit” for that.