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!

Information Overload is not new

That's what I have been stating in all SciVerse presentations too. Let's not forget Seneca's points on "trusted knowledge networks" too.

TextDigger goes to FederatedMedia

Another milestone for ScienceDirect and Elsevier

over 10 million articles!

kind of love and hate relationship

Mashup your article

After the Grand Challenge, Elsevier Article 2.0 is another initiative in "user contribution"

Navigating Scholarly Content

How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content by Simon Inger and Tracy Gardner. The research was sponsored by Annual Reviews, PNAS, Meta Press and NPG. (Via Bonnie Lawlor)

RSS Week in Review

While developing products people are after simplicity but is simplicity overrated?

JOVE reaches a milestone by being indexed by PUBMED and MedLine. Congratulations to JOVE team and our own Tyge Burgess for creating short video abstracts in YouTube for Journal of Number Theory.

Opening-up is good for science and product development. Here is how friendfeed science community is responding Connotea's call of figuring out a freemium service and how Yahoo Search is integrated in iphone . Searching images made easy by Yale Image Finder

Anthony Williams who was with ACD/Labs and we did some work together for ChemVillage, continues improving his ChemSpider platform.

Nature publishing launches another experiment by attaching a wiki to a journal article and Max Max Planck Society covers publication fees for PLoS journals.

American Chemical Society gets into Social Networking

As ACS gets into social networking now we need to figure out data portability issue via Richard Ackerman

Oil & Gas Industry getting into Semantic Web

"The Oil & Gas (O&G) industry produces a staggering amount of new data every day from a variety of activities such as drilling, exploration and production, reservoir management, major capital projects, facility and downstream operations. The problem of information explosion and overload presents an ever increasing challenge in finding and analyzing information quickly and precisely in order to get the most value for the business. This problem is not unique to the O&G industry; much the same can be said, for example, about the Health Care and Life Science (HCLS) industry, which has embraced Semantic Web technology in order to unite many forms of biological and medical information across diverse industries and institutions through the encoding of meaning into the data and their interpretations. The fundamental question is how Semantic Web technologies might play a similar role in the further development of energy resources."

via W3C

Microsoft focus in tools and services for academics

Tony Hey, VP for the External Research Division within Microsoft Research explains to John Udell the agenda and focus of his division:

Four focus areas:
health and wellness
E3 earth/energy/environment
computer science
education and scholarly communication

" In addition we have what we call ARTS: Advanced Research Tools and Services. There we're trying to develop tools and services that academics and computer scientists will find valuable."

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

"The Future of Science"

"Ideally, we’ll achieve a kind of extreme openness. This means: making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services. Such extreme openness is the ultimate expression of the idea that others may build upon and extend the work of individual scientists in ways they themselves would never have conceived."[bolding is mine] Michael Nielsen

We need semantics in scientific search

Scientific online publishers must develop expertise in semantic search in their technology teams and hire gurus in semantic web from academia or corporate world. That's one of the ways we will enhance the value of scientific content. Peter Mika's article describes why we need semantics in search. Peter is a researcher at Yahoo! Research

Here is some of the limitations of the current search platforms :

"Even though search is considered a functional technology, there are limits to a syntax-based approach. The following list shows some examples of these limitations.

• It is almost impossible to return search results that relate to the secondary sense of a term—especially if a dominant sense exists—for example, try searching for George Bush the beer brewer as compared to the President.
• The capabilities of computational advertising, which is largely also an IR problem (for example, retrieving matching ads from a fixed inventory), are clearly impacted because of the sparsity of advertisements.
• When no clear key exists, search engines are unable to perform queries on descriptions of objects. For example, try searching for the author of this article with the keywords ‘semantic web researcher working for yahoo.’
• Current search technology is unable to satisfy any complex queries requiring information integration such as analysis, prediction, scheduling, etc. An example of such integration-based tasks is opinion mining regarding products or services. While there have been some successes in opinion mining with pure sentiment analysis, it is often the case that users like to know what specific aspects of a product or service are being described in positive or negative terms and to have the search results appear aggregated and organized. Information integration is not possible without structured representations of content.
• Multimedia queries are also difficult to answer, as multimedia objects are typically described with only a few keywords (tagging) or sentences. This is typically too little text for the statistical methods of IR to be effective."

Interactive research platform for nano-community

"The nanoHUB is a rich, web-based resource for research, education and collaboration in nanotechnology. The nanoHUB hosts over 1100 resources which will help you learn about nanotechnology, including Online Presentations, Courses, Learning Modules, Podcasts, Animations, Teaching Materials, and more. Most importantly, the nanoHUB offers simulation tools which you can access from your web browser, so you can not only learn about but also simulate nanotechnology devices. The nanoHUB also provides collaboration environment via Workspaces, Online meetings and User groups."

via Deepak

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.....

Opening up for ideas: Article 2.0

After Grand Prize here comes Article 2.0. I agree with Paul Miller that seeing an idea using Talis platform will be great.

Biolit: Enhancing scientific articles for life scientists

"BioLit aims to extract database identifiers and rich meta-data from open access articles in the life sciences and integrate that information with existing biological databases.

The future of scientific article

"scientific paper of the future will be a work in progress — with different people with different skills and talents contributing to a body of work sequentially: one has the idea, another turns it into a hypothesis, another designs the experiments, another runs them, another analyzes the data, another visualizes them, another interprets them, another places several such pieces of work together into a historical and philosophical context and finishes writing the "paper". The bits and pieces of it are independently searchable and citable and they are all interconnected by links until the final version is put all together in one place. After all, science as the work of a lonely genius is pretty much a myth — it has been, for the most part, a very collective endeavor. The readers of the paper then keep adding their commentary, links to subsequent "papers," blog posts, media articles, etc. The unity of the paper — a single date, journal, volume, issue, page —
will be gone. All of science will become interdisciplinary and interconnected. "

Bora Zivlokic Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE , Journal of Science Communication

Another milestone for Elsevier and scientific community

Today, ScienceDirect has over 9, 000, 000 articles. As my colleague Paul indicated late last night "SD counter" was at 8,999,991 on 00:16 AM CET on Friday 20 June. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this milestone.

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