I promised some of you I would do this a while ago and I simply haven't got to it. But enough of the excuses. There has been a huge number of launches in the past few months of sites and services that are intended to act as social network sites for scientists. These join a number of older services including Nature Networks, OpenWetWare, and others. My concern is that with so many sites in the same space there is a risk none of them will succeed because the user community will be too diluted. I am currently averaging around three emails a week, all from different sites, suggesting I should persuade more people to sign up.  

What I would like to do is attempt a critical and comprehensive analysis of the sites and services available as part of an exercise in thinking about how we might rationally consolidate this area, and how we might enable the work that has gone into building these services be used effectively to build the 'next generation' of sites. All of these sites have good features and it would be a shame to see them lost. My dream would be to see an open source framework with an open data model that allows people to move their data from one place to another depending on what features they want. Then the personal networks can spread through the communities of all of these sites rather than being restricted to one, and the community can help build features that they want. As someone else said 'Damnit, we're scientists, we hold the stuff of the universe in our hands' - can't we have a think about what the best way to do this is?

What I want to do with this post is try to put together a comprehensive list of sites and services, including ones that get heavy scientific use but are not necessarily designed for scientists. I will miss many so please comment to point this out and I will add them. Then I want to try and put together a list of criteria as to how we might compare and contrast. Again please leave comments feel free to argue. I don't expect this to necessarily be an easy or straightforward process, and I don't expect to get complete agreement. But I am worried if things are just left to run that none of these sites will get the amount of support that is needed to make them viable. 

So here goes.

Sites 

Blog collections: Nature Network, ScienceBlogs, Scientific Blogging, Wordpress, Blogspot, (OpenWetWare)

Blog aggregators: Postgenomic, ChemicalBlogspace, ResearchBlogging

Social Networks: Laboratree, Ologeez, Research Gate, Epernicus, LabMeeting, Graduate Junction (Nature Network), SciBog, SciMeet, SciSpace, WAYS

Protocol sharing: Scivee, Bioscreencast, OpenWetWare, YouTube, Protocolsonline, MyExperiment

Literature sharing: citeulike, connotea, delicious, Bibsonomy, 2collab, Zotero (upcoming 2.0 version)

Others: Friendfeed, Twitter, GoogleDocs, GoogleGroups, Upcoming, Seesmic, eventseer.net

Microsoft is throwing their hat into scholarly communication: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly_communication.mspx

In particular:

The Research Information Centre (Beta)

Developed in close collaboration with the British Library, the Research Information Centre is a virtual research environment (VRE). It was designed to allow research partners to store, share, discuss, manage, find, and track all the components of a research project—including data, references, papers, bookmarks, proposals, internal messages, information, and findings—within a simple interface. Through support of the research workflow, this tool can simplify the process of information search, facilitate discovery, effectively manage research objects, and enable versioning and archiving. The collaboration environment resides within a hosted Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform, which is accessible from a Web browser. This service is currently in beta testing. Microsoft intends to share the code widely by the end of the year.

Read more about the Research Information Centre project

Research Output Repository Platform (Alpha)

Research output repositories are increasingly in use on university campuses and in research communities worldwide. Our platform for building repositories takes advantage of the strengths of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, the Microsoft Entity Framework, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. This technology, to be available through a free download, provides services that are based on open community protocols (such as the Open Archives Initiative–Object Reuse and Exchange [OAI-ORE], SWORD, and so on), which enables interoperability and integration with other tools and services. An included toolkit and code samples will allow developers to present data in original ways, demonstrating, for example, the relationships between a published paper, authors, research data, associated lectures, presentation slides, or PDFs. Currently in a limited alpha release, an open beta version will be available later in 2008.

Critical criteria

Stability: funding, infrastructure, uptime, scalability slashdot resistance, long term personnel commitment

Architecture: open data model? ability to export data? compatibility with other sites? plugins? rss/atom?

Explicit contextualization: is it possible for an outsider to understand the context of data posted publicly (e.g. can info like this be used by people not part of the project?)

Supported machine query/metadata technologies: OAI? RDF? COinS? other microformats?

Supports which functions of scholarly communication: Registration? Certification/Peer Review? Awareness/Access? Archival? Reward? (Van de Sompel, Payette, Erickson, Lagoze, & Warner, 2004; Roosendaal, Geurts, & van der Vet, 2001)

Design: user interface, 'look',  responsiveness