Science continues to get more social
November 27, 2007
2collab, a service from Elsevier, which I received a demo of earlier this week, went live today, adding another player to the scientific social networking space. Richard Akerman has an excellent review over on his blog. As he notes, at this point of time 2collab can be compared to social bookmarking services like Connotea and CiteULike with Scintilla-like user ratings, but Elsevier seems to have larger plans for the service. While they don’t quite say which direction they will go, it is clear that their idea of “collaboration” goes beyond sharing bookmarks. Already the service has some fairly nifty features to set up public or private groups that could be developed around a specific collaboration, but given existing properties like ScienceDirect and Scopus, Elsevier is sitting on some excellent information resources which, combined with all the features for bibliography import embedded in 2collab, could form the basis for a collaboration space. In other words people could tee off collaborations based on a shared space in 2collab and continue to collaborate there. This could even be extended into a value-added paid service in the future if, e.g. you want to start storing information (images, etc) there. I am thinking Backpack-like functionality around a collaboration space of shared information resources like publications.
One thing that might be on Elsevier’s mind is competition with Nature, which has done an absolutely wonderful job of leveraging web 2.0 paradigms into science via properties like Scintilla and Nature Network. I don’t quite think Elsevier has the web 2.0 ethos down quite like the Nature folk do, but they do understand scientific research, which is why I hope they stay away from social networking and the information connectivities that Nature enables and focus on more formal collaborative relationships.
I have long been critical of Elsevier for throwing up pay walls around it’s publications. 2collab is free and open. It comes with an API, both excellent moves. Just imagine if the company would lower some more walls; the power of services like 2collab would only be amplified. In a closed environment, social bookmarking and collaborative research only go so far, and then you start banging into walls. Public/Private groups and collaborative spaces around open information are the way to go IMO. Let’s see how this falls out.
In a nutshell, 2collab is a good, well thought out and designed service in a field that’s getting a little crowded for a relatively small userbase (no Digg like traffic numbers here). I consider Elsevier to be competing with Nature, but I believe they should have a different focus to be successful (I don’t plan to leave Nature Network anytime soon). However, without opening up more of their properties, they are limiting the long term success of a very good product. I’ll be following the evolution of 2collab closely.
Technorati Tags: Elsevier, Social Bookmarking, 2collab
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Publishing, Science, Social Networking, Software & Internet
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6 Responses to “Science continues to get more social”
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I had a quick look around but nothing grabbed my attention. The groups idea is nice but I prefer JournalFire or Scintilla. They could consider importing tagged data from Connotea and Citeulike to bootstrap it. I wonder if they can do this.
Pedro
In the current form, I completely agree with you. Other than the groups and, from what I heard, a nice simple API, there is nothing compelling to making me switch from Connotea I did like the somewhat sparse design). That said, I got a feeling that this is only a start.
If I recall you can import from Connotea and CiteULike, but I don’t think the tags come through (worth a try)
[…] Some other reviews are posted by SciLib and bbgm […]
Hi Pedro, Deepak
Yes, just to let you know, we are looking at the tagging aspects of our importing and exporting from other app’s. Unfortunately, we are trying to decipher how other sites have set up their information - but we’re trying! Setting standards for social app’s (so Open Social if it is versatile enough) has obvious benefits and really would help lower the walls around the different app’s that researchers use.
[…] Via Deepak, I hear of Elsevier’s new social bookmarking effort. Bookmarking services are great because they remove the drudgery out of maintaining a list of references or doing a literature review when writing a paper or proposal. 2collab is particularly nice because not only does it show you the references cited by the bookmarked paper, but it shows you papers citing the bookmarked article as well, making it as easy to go forwards as backwards in your literature review. It also shows you else is bookmarking your papers and commenting upon them, which given a large enough user base, can serve as an indicator of popularity/impact of a paper. Surprisingly(for a product from Elsevier), it’s open, free, supports import and export, and there’s going to be a public API. After reading the terms of use, registration disclaimer, and privacy policy(one of which says that everything you upload becomes copyrighted property of Elsevier, and one of which specifically disclaims any ownership of contributed material - I’m guessing a developer vs. publisher disconnect here), I sign up. The first thing I was prompted to do was to establish my profile, so I enter my blog and email and so forth, and I’m pleased to see that I can enter a Scopus author ID and it will automatically import my publications. This is a nice feature that I’ve wanted to see in Connotea, but would have been hard for them(or any third-party service not having their own database) to implement because they don’t have the ability to assign a unique identifier to each article. Unfortunately, I have no idea what my author ID might be, and a search in Scopus for my name a couple different ways turns up nothing. Web of Science is only missing one or two of my papers, but I can’t find a single one of my publications in Scopus. I can find some papers which cited my work in the database, but since my library subscribes to Web of Science and not Scopus, I can’t follow the citation trail to see if I’m in there that way. Here’s a more in-depth review of WoS vs. Scopus. OK, so that’s it for the profile. Saving my profile, I notice that if I put a URL where the site name is supposed to be, I get some database errors, so that’s evidence that they don’t have their input sanitization worked out just right. Hopefully, they’ll get this worked out before anything untoward happens. […]
I tried importing a Zotero export and all the tags were stripped. I didn’t try importing from Connotea because there was no way to delete the lot and start over using the same profile.
The Scopus intergration is nice, but I couldn’t find any of my papers in Scopus, and my library doesn’t subscribe to Scopus(subscribes to WoS), so as nice as the automatic forward links are, I don’t guess I’ll be using it.