Social Media for Scientists was the latest topic at this month’s San Diego Informatics Lunch Forum meeting.
Rich Apodaca of Metamolecular discussed his experiences in creating the Chempedia Labs site. This site, based on the Biostar, and Stack Overflow sites, is designed to help chemists ask and answer chemistry related questions and is one of the first sites to address the question “what would ‘social chemistry’ look like”.
The main challenges within the chemistry community is that they have a long tradition of holding their cards close to the vest — even within the academic chemistry community. And this is inherently antithetical to the aims of social media. The best chance of success, seems to be using social media to help existing communities that have a history of sharing.
William Gunn (@mrgunn) talked about the social aspects of Mendeley, and Mendeley’s API Binary Battle (a contest designed to encourage the development of new applications built on Mendeley’s API). Mendeley allows you to create groups for collections of papers. You can establish online journal clubs, and identify people with specific interests.
Blogs play a huge role in social media. The most popular blogs however, are those that deal with a narrow subject area. We discussed the example of Sally Church’s Pharmastrategy blog which deals primarily with cancer drug development.
Traditionally, conferences and scientific meetings were the only way that the members of a community of interest might make themselves known to one another. However social media like Twitter, Quora, Mendeley and Stack Overflow make it possible for these types of communities to emerge in a more ad hoc fashion.