Category: Technology

Laura Bonetta wrote an excellent article for the science journal Cell recently in which she quoted various science types who use Twitter on the subject of whether or not scientists should be tweeting. It’s a topic I’ve discussed more generally regarding scientists’ use of social media and online networking communities.

Anyway, she asked my opinion on a few matters regarding twitter and quoted me at some length. But, as is the way with such articles, which I’ve experienced from all three angles now, as interviewer, interviewee, and editor, she trimmed off the fat and rind from my responses, so I asked her if she’d be happy for me to reproduce them in their unedited entirety and she was, so here they are:

As far as I can tell you are the most widely followed science-based Twitter there is. Is that right?

I’ve no way of confirming that, but of the scientwists I follow, I don’t think many of them have 5000 or more followers. With the exception of @ProfBrianCox (8000+) and @RichardWiseman (12000+), and a few others. I’m small fry, though, compared to some of the much more successful Twitter users in other niches and I don’t just mean celebrities.

What do you think makes your Twitter entries so popular?

One reason is probably my proactive approach to building up a following with whom I engage on a daily basis via Twitter and in some cases on other online networks. If you tweet and then just sit back and expect users to beat a path to your door it doesn’t work. You have to be “out there” talking to people, being useful for potential followers, drumming up interest and then continually offering something back in return. Being friendly and avoiding expletives may help too ;-)

From what I have read your tweets are all about science or science policy. Do you ever Twitter about personal things?

It’s important to have a niche, I’ve been a science writer for more than 20 years, I guess talking about science is a big part of my life. Occasionally, I’ll tweet a photo via TwitPic I’ve taken or a song I’ve recorded via SoundCloud…but in general my followers know me for the science stuff.

Few scientists Twitter and most of them are postdocs or grad students? Why are few scientists into Twitter?

Well, I created a list of scientwists that now has more than 600 members, and there are lots of science Twibes now, including my scientist Twibe (500+ members). But, those are still small numbers compared to the numbers of scientists who could join. But, I don’t think it’s just Twitter that they are not into. I’ve spoken to lots of people who either just don’t “get it” (online social networking) or if they do get it, they see it as a waste of time.

There are, however, lots of niche online services aimed directly at scientists, even these are, in general, struggling to reach critical mass. That said, LinkedIn and Twitter themselves were not overnight successes. I just wrote about this very issue of generation F scientists on my blog.

Do you think it would be valuable for more scientists to Twitter?

I think there is a lot to gain from being connected in this way. Again, there has to be a way to build a mutually beneficial following that has some purpose. Certainly, there is little point in scientists joining simply to tweet about their coffee breaks, walking holidays, or showering schedule. However, if they wish to share their successes and failures in the lab, swap useful information and tips, or seek advice, then Twitter could be a useful way to do that.

Is the 140-character limit a good or bad thing for disseminating scientific information?

It’s a double-edged sword. The majority of my tweets are pointers to other resources, so there’s a headline, an enticement in other words, and a link to the resource. You don’t need more than 140-characters for that; and it still leaves room for someone to retweet it. However, you cannot have a decent, full-blown, high-level discussion via text message and Twitter is just the same. A lot of scientists recognise that and use FriendFeed as an “uber-twitter” instead.

Do you think Twitter could have an important role in science?

Well, it already does in a limited way. Certainly, I have heard about some scientific discoveries first on Twitter. It also occasionally throws up a truly unique viewpoint on a discovery or theory that can be stimulating for my writing and presumably could do the same for scientists reading those tweets too. The apparent spontaneity and brevity helps, but you have to keep up with a lot of streams to find the nuggets.

What is its value to you?

Fame and fortune! No, seriously, I just find it fun to use and it provides another way to let people know about what I’ve written and so get them reading my words. What more could a science writer ask? Also, as a writer, it’s yet another outlet through which I can express myself as and when the urge arises.

You also have a blog. How do you choose what’s a blog or Twitter-type entry? How do the two media differ?

I’m not sure I know what you mean. I blog about scientific discoveries, policy etc, and also point to my published work on other sites, I try to be unique in what I blog about, so there would be no choice between blogging or tweeting something. I don’t write blog entries with Twitter in mind, I write them with the reader in mind, and I rarely change the way I write a headline to suit Twitter, if I do it’s only to shorten it by a word or two.

The headlines from my blog are automatically fed to my Twitter account using the WordTwit plugin for WordPress. I hope they will act as a springboard for readers to jump to the blog. I also use a plugin called ChatCatcher, which pulls in comments people make about a post on Twitter and FriendFeed and ties them to the post in question.

How do you choose whom to follow?

Now, that’s a whole new can of worms to open. I no longer actively seek out new people to follow, although if I comes across someone interesting elsewhere I will usually follow them on Twitter. However, when someone new follows me, I do try to check out their bio, their website and their most recent tweets. If those things are of interest, then I’ll follow back.

I created a tongue-in-cheek Twitter decision flowchart that is actually semi-serious to reveal my thought processes and seems to gel with a lot of readers. Mostly, it’s about filtering out spammers, cranks, and selfish marketers.

UPDATE – NOV 5: Still working through the almost 650 members of the list, but now up to the P’s.

Pressure was on from lots of science tweeps for to categorise my scientwist list…so I’ve made a start.

The spillover (lots of tweeps in the T to Z group from the TweepML.org version of my scientwist list have now each been given a category as I cannot squeeze them into the 500 limit for the main scientwist list.

Everyone else will get a second list assignment where appropriate as follows:

• bio – med, health, psy, bioinformatics, pharma
• chem – chemical sciences
• earth – geo, environment, climate, oceans
• physics – physics, maths
• sci-comms – science communicators of all breeds
• tech – science computing, technology, engineering
• space – astronomy, space travel

If you’re a science type on twitter and aren’t yet on the list then let me know, either by commenting, email, or tweeting. Retweets of the list always welcome.

However, if you’re not following me and I am not following you, then remedy that situation first – I’m @sciencebase. Also, if you’re updates are protected, unprotect them otherwise there’s little point in adding you.

Before twitter created user lists, I hand selected scientists and science types on Twitter to help you find new and interesting people to follow.

I started the project with 100 of my own Twitter friends back in January 2009 and expanded the list to well over 600 members by November 2009.

I migrated the old manual list to Tweepml.org and then Twitter announced the release of its own lists system. I then added my scientwists to a twitter list.

Creating such a list doesn’t seem to have as many advantages as the Tweepml system, but it is worth doing nevertheless. It does. however, offer users a way to share their “filtered” lists with others. So, view that stream for tweets only from science types.

Unfortunately, Twitter lists have a limit of 500 members per list. You can create 20 lists per account. I have created several additional lists in various science categories including physics, bio, chem, and sci-comms.

Twitter lists offer yet another metric for those who worry about such things to focus on. Last time I checked, I was listed by other twitter users 620 times. On how many lists are you listed?

A quick analysis of online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Xing would suggest that a mere 1 in 7 research scientists use such tools as part of their work. This contrasts starkly with the business world where uptake is up to 88%. In other words almost 9 out of every ten employees in the commercial world are using online networking.

This is an odd finding, according to Richard Lackes of the Department of Business Information Management at Technische Universitaet Dortmund, Germany. He points out that scientific research is essentially a communication-driven process and that most of its participants are young and part of what we might refer to as the Facebook generation (Gen-F, you might say). Members of the business world have a much more even spread of ages and differences in internet acceptance, and yet, it is business users who are much more committed to online social networking.

There are, of course, many networking sites around aimed specifically at scientists and have been since the heady days of ChemWeb.com and BioMedNet.com in the late 1990s (two organisations with whom I worked for many years). Today, there are dozens of general science networking sites, academic networking sites, and specialist, niche sites. However, if we are generous and suggest that the top ten of those have on average 50,000 members and that they overlap in membership to say 20%, then we are still left to account for millions of other researchers who are simply not using these services.

Ijad Madisch of Researchgate suggests that the problem is simply one of time. “LinkedIn (as a professional network) needed a long time to go ‘viral’ and to reach that what they are now,” he asserts, “I think for scientists it will be the same. We are just now in the early evolution of scientific networks.” He points out that Researchgate, which has been around for about a year, has more than 150,000 members and is growing with more than 1,000 new sign-ups each day.

No single site addresses all the needs of research scientists. The generic sites like LinkedIn and Facebook offer users a way to link up with other people and have specialist sub-groups and pages, but that seems only to dilute their benefits. A social network of a few dozen members is no network at all, once you leave the school yard
, is it?

Victor Henning of Mendeley argues that most of the social networking sites are still fairly young. Of the web 2.0-inspired ones, Nature Network, with approx 20,000 members, is Methuselah, having launched in 2007, while LinkedIn or Xing have been going since 2003. The others (Scilink, LabRoots, Biocrowd, Laboratree, Researchgate, Academia.edu, LabMeeting, Pronetos etc.) have all been around for just over a year or so.

Henning suggests that the pure social networking sites for researchers just don’t work. “Most of them are me-too products that deliver little or no additional value over LinkedIn (and considering that networks depend on critical mass, they arguably deliver much less value),” he told me. “That’s why, even though social networking is a feature on Mendeley’s website, we don’t primarily see ourselves as a social network.” He says that Mendeley aims to deliver value to researchers independent of network effects, by helping them to manage and share their research paper collections.

“This appears to be working, considering that our userbase is growing at roughly 40% month-over-month this year,” Henning adds. “Our users have uploaded more than 5 million documents to their Mendeley accounts.” This, he explains, is where the “social” aspect kicks in. “We add a social layer to research data and turn research papers into social objects,” he says, “The next step for us will be to add recommendations based on a user’s existing library and reading habits, i.e. social connections emerging from the data that they’re working with – not just replicating an offline social network online.”

Now, personally I know a lot of scientists who are using social media and social networking tools. I have enlisted more than 600 members in a Twitter group after all, and hundreds of my contacts in research are on FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. Moreover, there are a lot of researchers out there working on tools and systems and approaches to connecting and communicating. There is also a lot of self-organisation going on and networks are emerging on ad hoc basis. But, despite their best efforts and a lot of hard work, I’m sure many of them recognise that they are yet to reach a critical mass of the kind achieved by an offline networking community, such as the American Chemical Society, for instance.

Oxford’s Richard Price of Academia.edu affirms that social media sites can take a while to get to critical mass. “It took LinkedIn from 2003 to 2007 to get to 10 million members; growth then really accelerated, and it is now at 45 million members,” he explains. “Twitter launched in 2006, and it wasn’t until January 2009 that it really took off.” He adds that at least one of the academic networking sites will get to critical mass; it is just a matter of time. “Sites like Academia.edu are growing fast; we have over 61,000 profiles at the moment,” he says, “and are seeing exponential growth. I think the critical mass point for an academic networking site is around 500,000 to 1 million profiles; that is when growth will really accelerate.”

Brian Krueger of Labspaces is less convinced of the need for online social networking for scientists. “In my short eight or so years in science (and three years of pretending I run a social network), I’ve noticed at least with the work I’ve done that collaborations come in cycles,” he says, “We’re not constantly looking for collaborators, so being plugged into a network might not be all that helpful. We can get our collaborations set up at yearly meetings.”

He points out that the current system of offline networking works well because of the nature of lab work. “We get ideas, focus on them, test, and then stop and think about the results,” he says, then, “We use scientific meetings to stimulate further hypothesis development at the thinking stage and to add new angles to our research. I’m not sure you can get the same out of a science social network.”

Lackes and colleagues Markus Siepermann and Erik Frank do feel that online social networks could offer a great opportunity for enhancing collaboration among scientists and suggest that a new approach is needed. Their proposed tool will apparently fill the gaps in the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook and make them more pertinent for researchers and at the same time could exploit the API (Application Programming Interface) of such services to draw on the benefits of those systems too. That is actually something Academia.edu already does with respect to Facebook. Again, I suspect whatever their approach they will have to confront the issue of achieving critical mass.

Every time a generic network, like Twitter or Facebook, passes a membership milestone, they issue a press release pronouncing their greatness. But, of an internet-enabled population of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, the paltry memberships of these services pale into insignificance against the wider global community
. The number of researchers active in online networks is but a mote in a sunbeam compared to those numbers. Even if there were a powerful Facebook or LinkedIn equivalent for researchers, what are the chances of persuading the scientists to join and get networking online?

“I think the chances are good if you can deliver real value without relying on network effects,” Henning retorts. “On Mendeley, the network effect is just the cherry on top: It allows us to deliver real-time research trend data based on the literature reading habits of our users; like Nielsen ratings for science.”

Krueger believes there needs to be a major cultural shift if online networking is to take on a bigger role. “Scientists really don’t like discussing their thoughts and ideas in the public domain (both for scooping and patent issues),” he points out, adding that there may be an assumed lack of security on internet-based social networks and a time-wasting aspect in that there’s nothing gained from time spent online when conferences and meetings provide all that many scientists feel they need. “For adoption of new technologies in science, it has to be an order of magnitude more useful than current tools,” says Krueger, “We just don’t have the time to waste learning new tools that only marginally increase our productivity.”

The point of all these various social networking, social media, and other online tools is communication. However, with the majority of scientists feeling perhaps that they are already well-served by their existing ‘meat-space’ networks they just do not see the point. And many of the current offerings do not immediately appear to be of value: there is no ‘killer app’ to draw practicing scientists in, says Richard P. Grant of f1000, a site offering an expert guide to the most important advances in biology.

András Paszternák creator and editor of The International NanoScience Community has seen enormous growth in this area. In particular, in his part of the world Eastern Europe, young researchers are networking using these tools more and more. “I think the future of these networks is in collaboration and integration,” he says, but points out that users are not necessarily keen to register with so many different sites for access, email, and blogging. “The war of the research social networks has begun…only the best, most interesting, and most scientific will survive!”

Lackes, R., Siepermann, M., & Frank, E. (2009). Social networks as an approach to the enhancement of collaboration among scientists International Journal of Web Based Communities, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2009.028091

With thanks to rpg7twit for proofing and suggestions.

In the olden days, scientists used to send out paper reprints of their research papers to colleagues…maybe they still do. I get the occasional request for such an archaic entity for the items I have had published in Science, PNAS, and other journals.

These days, you’re more likely to simply ask for an eprint of a scientific paper, probably a PDF, possibly a doc file, or some other electronic format. But, even that’s really only a front to making contact with the author as it ever was. However, these days journal copyright clauses usually allow individual researchers to republish their individual papers on their personal website, which opens up a whole new way of accessing single research papers for free.

Dr Ijad Madisch CEO of ResearchGate calls this the “green route” to Open Access. ResearchGate has around 140,000 scientist members after just a year online and each member has their own personal web page within the scientific social network…you see where this is leading, I presume?

ResearchGate today launches its Self-archiving Repository, which could provide members with free access to potentially millions of research papers without the obstacle of library subscriptions or the financial barrier of pay-per-view. It’s almost like ResearchGate is set to do for journal article what Spotify, Last.fm, and Pandora have done for music – a quick search and you can access the content you want instantly without a fee.

“Our publication index, containing metadata for 35 million publications, will be automatically matched with the SHERPA RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) data set of journal and publisher’s self­archiving agreements,” explains Madisch, “As a result, authors will know which versions of their articles they can legally upload. Since nine out of ten journals allow self-­archiving, this project could give thousands of researchers immediate access to articles that are not yet freely available.”

ResearchGate says that by using this approach its SelfArchiving Repository does not infringe copyright because each profile page within ResearchGATE is legally considered the personal website of the user.

It’s a neat idea, and one that could open the floodgates to other similar systems. I suspect, however, that once it becomes more well-known, the journal publishers will start looking more closely at their author copyright agreements and adjust them accordingly to preclude uploading to sites that are considered external to the authors’ own company or institution.

“We don’t know how publishers will respond to this,” Madisch told me, “but we are definitely not looking for confrontation. Our primary goal when developing this tool was to serve the entire scientific community.”

Aside from the fact that the green route to Open Access is bound to be welcomed by authors, it’s not going to be music to the ears of the journal publishing industry.

I’ve discussed the risk of losing your job because of blogging previously. Recently though there was a case of summary dismissal by Facebook of a young British woman who debased her employer’s good character via her Wall has gained several column inches in the popular press.

And, of course, we have all heard about the accommodation agent in the US is suing a twitter user for 140 characters of allegedly valid venom about the quality of their rental accommodation, despite the account having just 20 followers. She’ll be down $50,000 if she loses the case.

Regardless of how you feel about bosses, corporations and realtors, the point to remember is that posting on the web is not like gossiping in a pub. What you say on the web is cached, scraped, preserved essentially for all time and for anyone to see. You would have to be rather unfortunate to be caught on video slandering your boss over a pint or two in your local pub.

Worse, say you have several thousand Twitter followers, and you defame a major minor celebrity, word, can get around. You won’t be able to delete that tweet once it’s been archived, cached, and stored by dozens of scraping systems and bots. You and your celeb target will be stuck with it, and if you said something particularly venomous they might just sue.

All this behaviour brings to the fore, once again, privacy. Privacy laws are usually based on protecting personal information, but in most countries they are fairly woolly. They are completely open to interpretation and precedent-setting judgments.

In the nineteenth century, the right to privacy was thought of as a special case of a more general human right to be “let alone” and today we might say that privacy is “the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one’s private life or affairs”. In the global village of social networking and 24/7 connectivity, this is becoming a little difficult to define.

Our ancestors had little notion of privacy, in the middle ages, tightly packed dwellings in the, ahem, gated communities of walled cities and feudal villages, the individual had few rights (unless that individual was the feudal lord, of course). Money and power together bought whatever rights you wanted in those days. Now, money alone is not enough, how much privacy do the likes Britney and other A-listers have, despite their gazillion dollar bank accounts? Perhaps a little more than you think, but not that much more!

The rich and powerful, by whom I mean the shy and anonymous billionaires scrabbling to extract their money from recently open Liechtenstein bank accounts, for instance, presumably have all the privacy they could ever wish for.

Meanwhile, for the likes of you and me…we assume that no one cares about our mom and pop conversations on the phone, our possibly personal tweets, our Facebook Wall graffiti, at least if we’re 99.999% law abiding, anyway. However, as ambient computing of the kind that encompasses not only the internet refrigerator but the implanted biometric chip becomes more prevalent, there are going to be new privacy issues that are way beyond the imaginings of our feudal ancestors.

At first, these concerns will be subtle. Imagine you’re asked to wear a tracking device that would enable a multinational corporation to track your every move and potentially eavesdrop on all your phone conversations…you’d be appalled at the thought. But, how many of you have a mobile phone with location-based services…?

In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) is considering the idea of allowing clients, patients to you and me, the right to store their medical records on Google or some other cloud computing system (another topic I’ve discussed previously). That idea will open up a plethora of privacy concerns for many people.

Today the most well-known threats against privacy are thought to be public surveillance cameras (CCTV), eavesdropping on telephone networks, internet spying, and theft of medical data among other things. But, ambient computing will bring to light so many more issues in the coming years, when your exact coordinates, medical state, contacts list, biometrics, and much more are stored in a handy gadget connected to a Grid network that you carry in your pocket.

How much is your privacy worth? The benefits of that geo-tracking phone could outweigh the personal costs to you of loss of some privacy, they may not. According to Miltiades Anagnostou of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece, “Today’s information and communication technologies constitute a severe threat for privacy because they increase the volume of personal information available to potential enemies or simply the “society”. At the same time technology enables new ways of intervention in the life of a person.”

Technology is a double-edged sword, in other words, always has been. Our lowly ancestors in the middle ages had little notion of privacy and perhaps even less concern for it. These days, many people worry about it all the time…and if you’re bloggin about it or scribbling on your Facebook wall, they will know all about your concerns…

Anagnostou, M., & Lambrou, M. (2009). Privacy now and in the age of ambient intelligence International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2 (4) DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2009.027668

Meanwhile, is the digital age stifling that all important human trait, the ability to forget?