Eva Amsen: How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies:
Many, if not most, scientists are not in the habit of putting things online. The ones that are might be tempted by the concept of sharing the papers they read, letting everyone look at their lab notebook, joining a forum or writing a blog. If you're reading this in your RSS feed or clicked through from FriendFeed, you're probably one of those people. But think about your friends and colleagues who only turn on their computer for work and e-mail. They're not going to tag their favourite papers or discuss the process of research with total strangers on the internet. It's an extra thing to do that's not already part of their lives, and no matter how appealing they might find the concept of open data or sharing information, they won't join these sites or movements because it's not something they are already doing.So what are they already doing?
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Well i think scientist depend more on their post doc and PhD students, who in turn use text mining tools, NLP engines, to mine and track publication and research. When it comes to sharing most of these students are more familiar with web 2.0 sites and tagging sites.
But here is some thing i came across recently it is as easy as composing and checking your mails on Gmail or Yahoo. I think now scientist can try and use it all by themselves with out the help of their students.
Track publications of their interest
stare and collaborate
This is one cool stuff, if you are interested in reading manually annotated sentences and facts for any abstract of your interest- then you must try this service Xtractor its absolutely free - http://www.xtractor.in
some really interesting features too:
maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies. check out the facility to Share and collaborate.
Posted by: Kamesh Janakiraman | August 21, 2008 7:39 AM
Hi Kamesh,
XTractor is just fantastic; iam a registered user and I feel nobody has every tried out this concept of giving out manually curated data for free to the users. I was having a tough time shortlisting literature from PUBMED for my list of proteins, now XTractor keeps me posted regularly for free. And the collaboration features are just too good.
thanks again!!!!
Posted by: rachelle | August 21, 2008 8:25 AM