Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network

Note: CTSI CIO & Virtual Home (VH) Director Leslie Yuan's comments are featured in a recent Nature story and survey on online collaboration and various researcher social networks.

By Richard Van Noordan via Nature

Ijad Madisch, a Berlin-based former physician and virologist, tells this story as just one example of the successes of ResearchGate, which he founded with two friends six years ago. Essentially a scholarly version of Facebook or LinkedIn, the site gives members a place to create profile pages, share papers, track views and downloads, and discuss research. Nnadi has uploaded all his papers to the site, for instance, and Romeo uses it to keep in touch with hundreds of scientists, some of whom helped him to assemble his first fungal genome.

More than 4.5 million researchers have signed up for ResearchGate, and another 10,000 arrive every day, says Madisch. That is a pittance compared with Facebook’s 1.3 billion active users, but astonishing for a network that only researchers can join. And Madisch has grand goals for the site: he hopes that it will become a key venue for scientists wanting to engage in collaborative discussion, peer review papers, share negative results that might never otherwise be published, and even upload raw data sets. “With ResearchGate we’re changing science in a way that’s not entirely foreseeable,” he says, telling investors and the media that his aim for the site is to win a Nobel prize.

The company now employs 120 people, and last June it announced that it had secured US$35 million from investors including the world’s richest individual, Bill Gates — cash that came on top of two earlier rounds of undisclosed investment. “It was really a head-scratcher when we saw that,” says Leslie Yuan, who heads a team working on networking and innovation software for scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. “We thought — who are these guys? How are they getting so much money?”

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A battle for profiles
Perhaps wisely, administrators at some institutions have decided that few researchers can be trusted to be as assiduous as Faulkes in updating their various profiles. To avoid the problem of rotting links and out-of-date webpages, institutions are creating their own networks of automatically updated faculty-member profiles, using commercial tools such as Elsevier’s Pure Experts Portal, Thomson Reuters’ Converis and Wiley’s Knode, as well as open-source profile-building software such as Harvard Catalyst Profiles, run by the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and VIVO, developed at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and funded by a US$12.2-million grant from the US National Institutes of Health (VIVO partners with Symplectic, a London-based software company owned by Digital Science, a sister company to Nature Publishing Group).

These ‘top-down’ profile networks do not completely solve the updating problem, because they do not push each new profile change to ResearchGate, Academia.edu and the rest. But advocates see them as an important step forward, both because the information they contain is reliably up to date — often fed directly from an institution’s human-resources department —  and because they structure their information in similar standardized, machine-readable formats. The standardization, in turn, means that computer programs can easily extract data or yoke together information in separate profiles. Leslie Yuan, who develops networking software at the University of California, San Francisco, says that Harvard Catalyst-based profiles at her institution have been used heavily by journalists, administrators, faculty members and even a child who accessed them to make scientist trading cards for a school project.

Read the full story on Nature.com