Vision in co-creation solutions and future of STM research platforms

Today we've reached another milestone in our SciVerse and Application Marketplace and Developer Network initiatives.

When we started these initiative a few years ago our goal was very clear: accelerate science and help researchers do research better. We needed to create better knowledge discovery solutions (KDS) for scientists and researchers. We aimed to do this by collaborating with research and librarian community. We needed to enrich our content. We needed to connect from literature to data in a more intelligent and contextual way. We needed to make our content more interactive, more discoverable and accessible. We needed to create domain specific research tools. We wanted our users to customize the tools that they want to use. We wanted to let researchers create custom solutions. We also knew that we could not develop all these solutions ourselves. We believe in non-invented here. We needed to connect, collaborate and co-create these tools with scientific and research community. We needed to provide a flexible platform and services for the scientists who told us that they wanted to use our content their way. We needed to change how scientific research solutions were created. We needed to help research community to build solutions that they want and they need.

Hence we've built an application framework -a platform- where now we can introduce a new feature Author Wordle app in just 8 hours. (Talk about agile development in STM market and "turning products into platforms".)
We've started reaching out and collaborating with researchers and scientific community by doing hacks and challenges at New Jersey Institute of Technology , Rensselaer/Tetherless Worls Health, University of Sydney, National University of Singapore, Dalhousie and Tsinghua Uiversity.
We've reached out to librarian community with AppsforLibrary to get their input on what kind of solutions they want to see in our SciVerse platform.
With AppsforScience we've asked developers community to build search and discovery solutions using our content and APIs.

We can't thank enough to all the individuals(students, developers, researchers, librarians, corporations) who participated to these events and brought their creativity in building solutions and developed apps that are being shared in SciVerse platform with the global research community. All these individuals are the"first settlers" of what is called a distruptive platform and embraced the vision that we set for future research platforms.

Today's announcement of AppsforScience winners is a great example of co-creation of these solutions with the developers community. Congratulations to Altmetric developed by Euan Adie, Refinder developed by Leo Sauermann , iHelp developed by Mourougane Arumugam, Keyword Optimizer developed by Scott Fortmann-Roe and ChemDetect, developed by Keming Labs.

Go and use these new apps and other apps that we have in our gallery. Send your appreciation to the developers. Send us and developers your feedback
Enjoy!

That's collaboration

Government+private sector+academia+researchers, that's how we'll improve scientific productivity.

The next (Google) Wave of scientific collaboration

Google Wave can create a beautiful sea full of interconnected waves if Google can manage to "replace email" and change the "user behavior; potentially this may have a big impact the way we communicate and collaborate.
In terms of scientific collaboration and authoring tools (collaborative authoring) /peer review process this can have very interesting and useful applications. GW comes with open APIs too. As STM publishers we need change to get in this new sea of waves and be in the same wavelength with our users who will adapt this new wave of communication.

Photo by brewbooks

Yahoo [re]Search Pad

Yahoo Search team takes another great step to improve, search, research and collaboration. Search Pad is currently in beta

"Science is the ultimate Remix"

"We need to find ways to make sharing research results and tools easy, trackable, and useable by scientists on a day-to-day basis. Science Commons is working on these problems in a way that few other projects contemplate: they don’t write papers, they release “running code” like contracts for sharing biological materials and open contracts for biological tools like stem cells and genetically modified mice." Richard Bookman

ACC moves into social media with Blog Summit

ACC's plastic blog summit "is focused on the role of plastics in U.S. efforts to save energy through contributions to energy-efficient products, processes, and innovations. Our goal is to bring together influential voices from inside and outside of industry to help communicate to a larger audience in new and different ways."ACC

Changing nature of scientific collaboration

"Dr Bly points to a paradox: the internet was created for and by scientists, yet they have been slow to embrace its more useful features. Nevertheless, serious science-blogging is on the rise. The Seed state of science report, to be published later this autumn, found that 35% of researchers surveyed say they use blogs. This figure may seem underwhelming, but it was almost nought just a few years ago. Once the legion of science bloggers reaches a critical threshold, the poultry problem will look paltry" Via Economist
photo by joon

Today's links

If you are figuring out the collaboration space for scientist; Parallax brings something refreshing into search using freebase; and give credit where the credit is due: Thomson Reuters opening up with forums

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.s

Microsoft supporting scholarly communication lifecycle

At the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft announced the following services which were developed by partnering with Academia:

• Add-ins. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service.

• The Microsoft e-Journal Service. This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals.

• Research Output Repository Platform. This platform helps capture and leverage semantic relationships among academic objects — such as papers, lectures, presentations and video — to greatly facilitate access to these items in exciting new ways.

• The Research Information Centre. In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process. via Microsoft PressPass

Creating meaningful learning environments

Another educational piece from Dr.Michael Wesch

via Stephen's Lighhouse

Open up to let scientists build applications

Bertalon Mesko post about Intermedi which was built by Thibault Helleputte using PubMed's open API.

Limitations of Pubmed: while being the most complete database of biomed publications, it has a major drawback: it is just publications-centered, not people centered. Even Hubmed, which is a re-engineering of Pubmed do not cover the people aspect. However the connection between people is an essential element for future collaboration, for knowing who works in the same area as who, etc.
Limitations of social networks: Every member of any social network knows it, the “friend” or “contact” status doesn’t always reflect a real-life situation. In my LinkedIn profile or in my Facebook profile, I have “friends” and “contacts” I never saw once in my life. A tool centered only on true relation between people could be welcome. via Personomics

Via Bertalon Mesko

Once you open up the scientists and researcher's creativity will bring new applications and solutions that will enhance the value of the content.....

Platfoms continue to open up

ebay opening up its site to developers via Project Echo


" Like other online apps that have become platforms, such as Salesforce.com and Facebook, eBay's new initiative, called Project Echo, will give developers not just access to rich data they can package up for customers, but also a marketing channel for their applications." Via WebWare

Scientists and FriendFeed

Cameron Neylon explains how scientists are using this service to collaborate....

Scholarz.net helping researchers

"scholarz.net is an online-software for better research and academic writing. It offers reference management, knowledge organisation, social knowledge and research community"

The company was started off as a project at University of Wuerzburg

Open up and and bring the creativity of the scientific community

Follow the discussion which was started by Deepak about "Elsevier Grand Challenge" in friendsfeed, the wiki summary of the challenge was created by Pawel

Bring in 'Da Collaboration

Scispace: Social Networking Site for Scientist

Scispace was developed "between members of the NIEeS and the eMinerals and MaterialsGrid projects."

It's all about scientific communication and collaboration.

e-Science in action at myexperiment

myexperiment lets scientists share their research and scientific workflows.

If you are interested and trying to figure out applications in "scientific research workflow" watch these folks.

Young scientists view on key global scientific challenges

This April in celebration of 75th anniversary,ICSU (International Council for Science) brought together 147 young scientists from 71 different countries to discuss global scientific challenges. The discussions were around four topics:

1. "building bridges within the scientific community
2. building bridges between science and the world
3. working with the private sector
4. scientific freedom and responsibility"
   

One of the conclusions of the first topic was: "there is a great “fragmentation of knowledge” that makes it very difficult to realize collaborations between groups belonging to diverse disciplinary areas."

Christina Airoldi's review which is published at Chemistry International provides additional insights. Conference presentations can be found here.

The value of blogs, wikis and RSS for Intel

Jeff Moriarty's post describes how Intel is using Blogs, Wikis, forums and RSS in internal communication and information sharing. In summary:

"The summary is that the major value I see in these tools is smashing through internal behavioral and cultural walls. Breaking those down will bring benefits in reducing redundancy, breaking down silos, improving product quality, and increasing team agility."

Biowizard gets funding from MentorTech

Biowizard which brings interactivity and Digg like features to bibliographic search gets funding from MentorTech Ventures.
""There is a significant demand in the biomedical research community for an interactive web community like BioWizard," stated Michael Aronson, managing director of MentorTech Ventures and BioWizard board member. "Thesite offers a unique combination of information and collaboration toolsthat are not otherwise available to scientists and physicians." PR Newswire