Michel Roland's List: Social Networks for Scholars

• Greetings librarians and information professionals! Earlier today, I blogged about why tenured faculty and emeriti should use a social networking site such as Pronetos. The library science community is at the forefront of this new digital age, so I thought you might enjoy the post, which is reposted below.

    

  The idea for my post came from a post by Rikke Agawa at UCLA, a member of the Medical Library Association's Task Force on Social Networking Software, as is this community's own Molly Knapp. Thanks Molly and Rikke!

• There’s three barriers to Social Web extracting the wisdom in sciences as it does elsewhere.
• The first is the lack of a crowd – not only is the total number of scientists in any one field pretty low in terms of internet numbers, but it’s even lower in reality with specialization.
• Second problem is that scientific communication is a different beast than normal human communication. Scientists talk to their friends, but when talking to people they don’t know, it’s much more formal. They use communication to spec theories and to claim ground as theirs.
• It’s not a matter of “web 2.0 technology will trump old ways of sharing stuff” (a statement I tend to believe is true) but a matter of “stuff that doesn’t get shared anyway isn’t likely to get shared simply because the technology exists to share it.”
• Third problem is that there are no rewards for participating in these new forms of communication. Thus the title of the post. Has anyone gotten tenure for a well-linked blog in the life sciences?
• Citations are a place in science where you have demonstrated something to be true (or at least an approximation of truth). They’re a formal style of communication that says, not only is this a fact of nature, but I – ME - am the one who proved it to be so.

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• myExperiment makes it really easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and  other research objects, and to build communities.

• OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering. Learn more about us here.
  If you would like edit access, would be interested in helping out, or want your lab website hosted on OpenWetWare, please join us.

• The BibApp is an 'Institutional Bibliography'. The service matches people with citations. Once the data is captured, Librarians look for archivable works and can engage people in personalized copyright instruction.

• L'annonce en novembre dernier par la Nasa d'une découverte qui allait changer la recherche de vie extraterrestre et les débats en ligne entre scientifiques qui ont suivi marquent une révolution dans l’évaluation des études scientifiques.

• Autrefois, les scientifiques souhaitant émettre de telles critiques avaient un champ d’action plutôt restreint. Ils pouvaient écrire à Science en espérant que leur lettre soit publiée un jour, généralement bien après que l’attention du public se soit tournée vers d’autres sujets. Ils pouvaient écrire au journal local, en essayant de résumer leurs objections en moins de 50 mots. Ou enfin, ils pouvaient ronchonner autour d’une bière en compagnie de quelques collègues aux idées similaires.

  Aujourd’hui, ils peuvent former des communautés en ligne.
• L’évaluation par les pairs post-publication —et la science «ouverte» en général— fait de plus en plus d’adeptes dans la communauté scientifique. Toutefois, certains affirment qu’elle est plus efficace en théorie qu’en pratique. L’affaire #arseniclife constitue le premier cas d’article prestigieux à avoir été ouvertement rejeté par la communauté scientifique, influençant la manière dont le grand public l’avait perçu.

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