Author: Katja Reuter

Integrating “grassroot” funding opportunities with research networking

/ Katja Reuter / 3 Comments

I guess most researchers look for money to explore ideas. With little funding they can run initial experiments and find out if an idea is worthy of a grant proposal. But processing small donations comes with difficulties for researchers.

The website SciFlies is preparing to offer a solution. At SciFlies researchers can sign on to build a profiling profile to present themselves and their research projects. On the profile they can present their research vision, past accomplishments, interests and even their current reading list.  Website visitors can then donate and support the projects they find most worthwhile. SciFlies provides a mechanism that allows small financial contributions to accumulate and get delivered at some later point.

This model may be interesting for us and the Virtual Home portal, once we think about ways to reach out to the community. It could create long-term interest in researchers and their work.  But more importantly, it provides a powerful incentive for researchers to update their profiles.

By the way, the thoughts behind the name “SciFlies” are pretty unique.  It says: “It’s a homage to the ubiquitous fruitfly research model, a shorthand description of the goal to create a ‘swarm’ of science supporters, and a reference to ‘fly’, a slang term for cool.”

P.S. The SciFlies website  is work in progress. I will update the blog as soon as the website is fully launched.

Conference: Advancing Rare Diseases Research through Networks and Collaboration

/ Katja Reuter

Maybe this is a topic for us to tap into in the future?

According to the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), “this conference will provide a forum to discuss lessons learned from the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network, highlight successful collaborations to improve rare diseases research, highlight the involvement and essential role of patient advocacy groups to facilitate research and accrual of patients, and discuss the role of best practices across research consortia and research networks for translation of basic discoveries into clinical practice in rare diseases.”

Date: July 16, 2009

Location: National Instiutes of Health Natcher Auditorium

Agenda

The conference is presented by the National Center for Resources (NCRR) and the Office of Rare Diseases Research at the National Institutes of Health.

 

Information about the NIH Rare Diseases Clinial Research Network is available here.  

Another Sharing Environment – World Wide Science

/ Katja Reuter

This is a global science gateway connecting, which some of you may know. Currently, 40 national and international scientific databases and portals from more than 50 countries are searchable. New features seem to  make it easier to share search results through social-networking sites, cluster results to let users quickly narrow results lists, author, topic or date, and provide improved relevance ranking.

New Online Initiative for Mining

/ Katja Reuter

The PsychHTS initiative invites neuroscientists with new ideas for a potential psychiatric drug target to apply for access to the infrastructure and expertise provided through an online PsychHTS platform. It has been launched by the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Selected applicants are then “paired up with a Broad scientist ‘chaperone’ to develop further tests.

The editorial of the latest Nature Neuroscience views this initiative in the light of previous projects, e.g., the Molecular Libraries by the NIH.

Module Tabs Design

/ Katja Reuter / 3 Comments

Using the space on our homepage efficiently and emphasizing priorities can be somewhat challenging. I find the module tabs design on the PLoS Medicine homepage interesting. Cynthia, maybe this is something for you to explore? What about using this concept for our sections events, deadlines and news? This way we could save space on the page, combining them in one block, and add to the tool “filter by” that already exists.

Tangential Thoughts: Controversy about Academia and How it May Slow the Search for Cures

/ Katja Reuter

A Newsweek article is making waves. The author Sharon Begley asserts that academia and organized science essentially slow down the path from basic science to a meaningful “cure”. One of her major arguments is that academic science emphasizes basic science and novel discoveries at the expense of research around patient treatments. That explains why this article even sparked the interest of the CTSA. The solution that Sharon Begley offers? – “a powerful director who can get beyond the rhetoric about moving discoveries out of the lab and make it a reality.” In her view “that hasn’t happened yet, six years after a much-ballyhooed NIH ‘road map’ declared such bench-to-bedside research a priority and vowed to reward risk-taking, innovative studies, not the same old incremental research that has produced too few cures.”

But there seems to be disagreement. An interesting blog post comments on this article and provides interesting insights from a researcher’s perspective: “Begley’s criticisms rely on some anecdotal stories from researchers, who either had a hard time getting their research funded, or found their translational research being published in ‘less prestigious’ journals than their or others more basic science research. But there’s no evidence that this is a system-wide phenomena – indeed, I’d counter with my own anecdotes that translational research is currently the new golden child of the area of science I’m exposed to,…”

Tips & Tricks for UCSF Web Workers

/ Katja Reuter

Marc Cepeda from the UCSF School of Medicine Information Services Unit has developed a blog “Web Workers Notebook” with “tips & tricks” as a resource for all UCSF web workers. So far he for example covered issues like Dreamweaver Site Cache, web file naming, Flush Cache Tab, embedding Flash video and MP3 audio files.  Take a look.

Harvard’s Twitter Research

/ Katja Reuter / 1 Comment

The purpose of Twitter may be still up for debate, but now even researchers at Harvard analyzed the data of 300.000 Twitter users, studied their behavior and compared it with other social networks. There are some surprises:

– Men tend to have about 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. “This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter” ( men 45% of Twitter users, women  55%).

– Despite the fact that both men and women send at about the same number of tweets per day, both men and women are more likely to follow men. 

– “80% are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks’ members had at least one friend. This suggests that actual users (as opposed to the media at large) understand how Twitter works.”

– “Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely.”

These results contrast what research has found out about online social networks. “On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women – men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.”

 I wonder whether there are differences that apply to the way female and male researchers would use research networking tools. Do they have different expectations regarding the features? Do they network differently? 

Do you know of studies that target these questions?