By Isha Antani
Social networking has become viral in this day and age. Despite the fizzling of early pioneers like Friendster, once the idea caught on with the common masses, there was no stopping it. The concept of easily maintaining connections with all the people one had met with in life (either professionally or under lighter settings) appealed to all groups of all shapes and sizes.
The concept has evolved from its early phase of just bringing distanced friends closer to incorporating the many different networks one can be a part of—ranging from a network of colleagues to a network of relatives to a network of people sharing one’s hobby of stamp collecting. Additionally, people have also started using these networking spaces for a lot more functionalities (e.g. information sharing, marketing tool, collaborating) that go beyond a pure connection medium.
An interesting question then arises. Could the science community see itself using such a space? The community is known for encouraging collaboration and association among different labs to purse a common thread of research. However, it is equally notoriously known for keeping its secrets under a thick lock before the data is finally published. Due the surge in the followers of the whole networking concept, this particular question is being asked with growing frequency in various labs—with the younger “Facebooking” graduate and undergraduate students promoting such an idea to their older, contract-touting PIs. The former group wants to facilitate the way research is done, while the latter knows just how significant it is to be the first one to publish a certain nugget of information and thus sharing before publication is a no-no.
Increasingly, the community has been attaching itself to the ideas of “free” and “open source,” giving rise to initiatives like PLOS, Cytoscape, and WikiPathways. Many of the conferences held this past year, like ISMB and ICSB, gave ample stage time to speakers who were advocating tools that promoted these thoughts. The problems with these data sharing gateways are similar to the ones mentioned earlier—credibility might be lost, fear of competition stealing data, lack of incentives to get scientists to publish. However, if the community works together to establish a standard for publishing and information sharing that supports this new model of freedom of knowledge, then these problems could be overcome. Take for example, Pfizer’s approach. Recently it has started multiple collaborations with various academic labs to gather information on the Insulin Pathway. In order to have an effective collaboration, Pfizer is funding the research, which will be kept in the public domain (to please its academic collaborators) and once the target is found, all the subsequent information would be kept private (to benefit its own drug production specialty). So in short, both parties are together on discovery, separate on drug development.
The world of science is starting to greatly feel the importance of open, free communication of ideas for any strong headway to be made in research. Therefore, the idea of an easy-to-use online communication tool that facilitates collaboration, encourages data sharing, and serves as a good knowledge repository seems to be the right nugget to chew upon at this moment.
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