Ologeez. Is this the paper discussion site we were looking for?

April 11, 2008

Shirley points us to Ologeez, a new service developed by Jason Hoyt, a grad student at Stanford. Ologeez is not the first site that takes aim at a user-rating/community approach to scientific publication, but for some reason it’s the first one that has made a good first impression. Since I don’t have a university email address I can’t try it out, but it seems to take aim at building community around papers, drawing elements from other existing services, but in a mix and look n feel that appeal to me. It also squarely takes aim at the academic crowd, so I’m unlikely to be the target audience. I wonder if the wiki can embed screencasts posted to Bioscreencast. Would love to see people sharing informatics protocols like that.

The thing I do worry about is the hosting. Perhaps if this takes off, it can be ported to a non .edu domain.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Science, Social Networking, Software & Internet 

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    Yeh, bit of a shame we can't get on. It looks a bit like citeulike but probably better presented. However from the tour it sounds like it doesn't have the capabilities of citeulike in automatically uploading papers. And I see no mention of Bibtex or XML output. The wiki feature is nice but I'm not sure that necessarily linking lab information directly with literature management is either necessary or good. I see more argument for close coupling of protocols and lab books as per the OWW model.

    I think we need to start making the case much more vociferously for agreed interchange standards for all these sites. I'm certainly not going to be happy with all of my material tied up in one place. I want to use the best of each tool with the knowledge I can pipe it back to wherever I want to aggregate.
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    Ologeez (-ologies, get it?) looks promising, but I'm not convinced it's going to succeed. First, I don't feel like I can rate the quality of a paper by reading its abstract. Reading a scientific paper takes me one to several hours, depending on how familiar I am with the subject of the paper. I think this is why discussion groups for science rarely take off -- no one has the time to do the required reading.

    Registration is limited to people having email addresses from the following universities: Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, UCSF, and Yale. I wonder why.

    Section 7 of the terms of use states that you effectively give away all your rights to anything you post, which might be a problem for some people. Section 8 of the terms of use states that advertising may appear on the site, something I find curious for a site hosted by an academic institution.
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    I have been following your posting on different publishing alternatives (as well as yout other posts). This was a nice site, but for my uses it is kind of an overkill. I am trying out a blog-based publication model with a much simpler set-up. What I've found is that publishing in places like JustScience gives you a reasonable hit-rate from google searches, and I am thinking that maybe publishing through blog-posts could be a permanent alternative/addition to traditional publishing. Please come have a look at www.sciphu.com. If you or your readers can help me with ideas for development of the site I would be very thankful.
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    Will definitely take a look. It's an interesting take on the problem.

    Doesn't being on blogger really limit your options though?
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    Yes, it does. Until (if ever) this is a success however, Blogger is a time-effective solution for me. I am nevertheless grateful for any suggestions on other platforms, hosting alternatives, web-design solutions etc.
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    :) This is the kind of application that I think Joomla or Drupal are well suited for, due to their more general nature and flexibility. Hosting is of course going to be an issue. For Bioscreencast, the combination of Slicehost Amazon has been perfect. I'm actually thinking of moving everything I have to Slicehost at this time


    Actually come to think of it, with appropriate user control, a well designed Wiki might be ideal for this. Depends on your long term goals. Joomla and Drupal are fairly extensible which does make things easier in the long run
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    We remember that this is one grad student, so it's difficult to really fault the person to release the site in limited beta, esp given university hosting and all that.

    Now as for the actual usability, I agree with the points being made below. I think it's one of the reasons none of these sites have really made it. Unlike popular news stories, the vast majority of publications are relevant only to a few and you can't really skim them (as Conrad points out).

    Section 7 is probably the thing I have most issue with. That's a no no.


    In the end Connotea/CiteULike probably have the most traction and the volume to really do this, but they haven't. Perhaps they are concerned about adoption and how they are perceived.
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    Wow. Thanks for the writeup and the feedback. A few quick things...

    1) Registration is limited for now just to get the server settings right. I just happen to have colleagues at the universities currently listed. If you'd like to try it out and your university .edu is not listed then shoot me an email to signup [at] ologeez [dot] org.

    2) Thanks for looking over the terms of use. Section 7 has been modified. Your data should remain that way. Section 8 concerning advertising was removed. I don't like advertising and of course this is a .edu domain for now.

    3) Eventually, after finishing grad school I plan to take it off of the .edu domain.

    4) EndNote export is currently supported. Bibtex and XML coming soon...with my own lab experiments and thesis writing permitting. PubMed articles can be imported directly and easily when logged in.

    5) The goal here is not to replace citeulike, connotea, or numerous other similar sites. I started out with just a paper discussion, but quickly learned that was not enough to improve how science is done in a Web 2.0 world.

    With that in mind I built out other features. I've purposefully minified personal profiles on the site and instead am putting the emphasis on the groups. I don't consider this a social networking site such as Facebook per se, but it has similar elements. Networking should be done within groups and not within a personal profile. Hence the group emphasis.

    Many other features are on roadmap. I'm a tech junkie and plan to make use of mobile technology sometime soon. There are current needs in this area of academia and industry that haven't been met yet.

    Lastly, as with my own lab experiments, this hasn't been about trying to make money, but to improve knowledge. I don't plan on ever using typical advertising, even if this moves off of the .edu domain. I do plan on improving literature search and making it easier to find collaborators and learn about your field.

    ~Jason Hoyt
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    Hi Jason, it would be great to get some access to play around, then I can probably make some more useful suggestions. Will try to email you later from a .ac.uk domain if that is ok. Committment to Bibtex and XML is great, and I do appreciate that you're doing this amongst other more 'serious' things. Just to emphasise I think the future will be in people pulling things in from multiple places so good interaction with feeds and tools like Exhibit from the simile group is crucial to getting traction. What would be great would be if you could seamlessly pull all of my papers from citeulike/connotea into ologeez to provide all the functionality for all things.

    Don't be discouraged by our criticisms either, we're a fussy lot. The only way things will get better is by people like you building stuff.

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