As I mentioned in my earlier post on open notebook science, this open lab notebook is inspired by Carl Boettiger’s Open Notebook.
Carl’s open notebook migrated from OpenWetWare, which DataONE also experimented with, to WordPress, and ultimately to Jekyll.
Carl does some interesting things in which he uses Flickr to host images (which unfortunately I think is a violation of Flickr’s Terms of Service, but hey it’s for science, right?), Github to host code (I don’t produce any code – at least not at the moment), Twitter to host online discussions, and most interestingly, Mendeley to host a document library and show what he’s currently reading. As an aside, I would be interested in where the “Figure Sharing” platform http://figshare.com/ could come into play in Open Notebook Science.
My mendeley sophistication isn’t that great – although I use it on all of my research papers to collect and access pertinent journal articles and generate APA citations, I’ve had some problems. In fact I am pretty sure I uploaded some documents to my personal Mendeley in a way that inadvertently suggested these were MY research papers.
So, I eye Mendely with a certain skepticism – but I really admire what Carl is doing with his. He is a member of a “Theoretical Ecology” group with 10 members, and also has Mendeley spit out his current reading list. So, I can always keep up with Carl’s reading.
Mendeley bills itself as an “Academic Social Network” and “the best way to manage your research.” Here’s my Mendeley page – obviously needs some work. I commented to my advisor that a researcher’s presence or absence on Mendeley or other professional social networks such as academia.edu might be indicative of commitment to or interest in Open Science. Academia.edu tagline is “Share Research” and offers connectivity to Facebook. From my research tracking down CVs for a network analysis project, I can attest that there is fair representation of DataONE members on Mendeley, Academia.edu, and LinkedIn.
It is fascinating to hypothesize about what groups and demographics of researchers participate in what social networks, and I’m looking forward to actual data to quantify any potential trends.
DataONE has a few individuals and groups that use Mendeley, as a quick search reveals <http://www.mendeley.com/groups/search/?query=DataONE> The Provenance Working Group has 7 members and 79 papers. There are some other members that I cannot quite discern, but notable public figures within DataONE have a presence there, including Bill Michener, Rebecca Koskela, and Bruce Wilson.
In the course of my research, I inevitable find evidence or instructions on how to accomplish a task in related papers. There are a few papers I know of that are related to complexity and science collaborations I would like to share right now as an example, but those links are buried in my e-mail somewhere.
I will endeavor to correct that.
