Biomedical science has never been more exciting or productive. Research tools have become increasingly powerful, and progress continues to accelerate. Yet, these are stressful times for many biomedical scientists, because competition for grant support, jobs, and publishing in the most prestigious journals is also accelerating. The stress associated with publishing experimental results--a process that can take as long as obtaining the results in the first place--can drain much of the joy from practicing science. - Duncan Hull
I'm not paying $10 to read a letter to a GlamorMag. - Bill Hooker
"Both editors and referees could help. Referees need to be more thoughtful when recommending additional experiments and to make sure that these experiments are truly needed to justify publication. Editors should insist that reviewers rigorously justify each new experiment that they request. They should also ask reviewers to estimate how much time and effort the experiment might require. With this information in hand, editors can more easily override referees'excessive demands. This requires confident, knowledgeable, and experienced editors, and it risks alienating referees, who are often hard to come by. Nonetheless, editors should be encouraged and empowered to perform this crucial task." - Duncan Hull
"A more radical solution, which is already used by some journals, is to have editors and their relevant editorial board members triage papers so that only those that meet the criteria of interest, novelty, and importance appropriate for the journal are sent out for formal review. This will save reviewers' time. In addition, papers that clear this initial hurdle can then be reviewed solely for scientific accuracy, appropriateness of controls, clear writing, and justification of the conclusions." - Duncan Hull
Enabling! I'm so done with doing research right now. Too slow, too frustrating. It's fun now that I'm writing up my thesis, but every chapter was two years of work and I was unhappy and stressed and suppressed 99% of my time at the bench. - Eva
doing research. But mother Nature said "NOOOOO!!!!, the bench is not a safe place for Science when you're using your pipetman" :-) - Pierre
enabling. I like the variety of challenges that brings as opposed to the microfocus of research - Daniel Swan via twhirl
Doing it, definitely. I've been a patch clamper a long time now, but I still get a thrill when I see currents up on the screen. There's nothing like it. - NatBlair
I loved doing research myself, but as a career, definitely the latter. - Deepak
Enabling: adding value to anything which helps the scientific method. Always different, emerging and interesting. - Matt Wood
Enabling it. I have the same feeling as Eva and Matt. - PauloNuin
both, but like to walk on the computational side - Attila Csordas
occasional bench research + running lab as a PI + teaching students - 2/3 of the current hellish grant burden = perfect - Maureen
enabling. greater variety, plus I still get to do all the original thinking I want to. Also I was a danger with P32. - Simon Cockell
I love doing research, but I hate writing it up. I enjoy writing well-crafted Ruby code to answer scientific questions, but I'm utterly useless at communicating the results. - Michael Barton
Haven't had much experience enabling yet, but I have the feeling I'd enjoy enabling research more consistently than doing research. But doing research does give a thrill if it goes well and you can keep the interest alive. - Shirley Wu
I do lots of "research" -- on the internets... - Eric Jain
Enabling & Connecting Minds. In doing my focus seems to move towards empirical work, statistics, anything in highly complex macro-systems. Ah, science in industry is cool. - dekay
It used to be research but then it got to a point where there were no tools available that could meet my needs, so now it has turned to enabling and trying to develop those tools. - Paul Bacchus
maybe I'm on the enabling side? Well fact is I've developed my share of computational methodologies and software so far, and it was fun!, but when it comes to thinking about the biological theories/hypotheses/paper writing from the data the software spit out, I kind of hate it. So I guess I'm no into "doing research", but more for hacking the heck out of it... - Ntino
I just don't know. I'm having a really hard time with that exact question right now. I'm nearing my use-by date as a postdoc and not sure I really want to try to scramble up the faculty food chain. - Bill Hooker
Thanks for all your help with this so far guys. I tired to make it very explicit that the answers to this will be released into the public domain for analysis. I wasn't sure but the laws here in the UK are some what strict about releasing information people have given so I thought I should try to be as safe a possible about this. - Michael Barton
Any feedback on the legal implications would be welcome. - Michael Barton
I also deleted any previous answers that had been entered so far, because I wasn't clear about how the data would be used. So if you've filled out the survey once, and are happy about your data being released, you'll need to do it again. - Michael Barton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... should be enough to figure if you're covered. Data is anonymous and if everyone who takes place understands the data is to be released, not sure what the problem would be - Daniel Swan via twhirl
Michael, for Nationality, should I put "American" or "United States"? "American" is geographically (though not practically) ambiguous. Too bad those fields aren't drop-down boxes so the input is standardized and idiot proof. :-( - Chris Lasher
I've only studied bioinformatics briefly but should be eligible to fill out the survey and I may be able to forward this to some researchers I know - Julian Baldwin
Big thank you to everyone who has reposted the survey. - Michael Barton
@Chris Yes, I agree. I had planned to standaradise nationality with a set regular expressions but a drop down list would have been better. Also if I had used stardard ISO country codes I could have displayed the data on a map using the Google chart API. - Michael Barton
Science Progress is amazing. I subscribe to only the best posts via AideRSS, which I can't recommend highly enough for those of us without enough time: http://www.aiderss.com/rss/gre... - Donnie Berkholz
"Like" as in "I like that someone noticed this and is still pushing the issue". - Andrew Perry
Well, if it's tre that the odds of someone getting a tenure track position by 35 are only 7%, there's only one solution: make PhD programs a mandatory two decade ordeal! That should get most people past 35! - Todd Harris via twhirl
"In 2007, two hundred scientists received six or more NIH grants, and a single investigator won 32 grants, while many others got close to ten." This sounds ridiculous. It is clear that this investigator cannot be coordinating closely all those projects. - Pedro Beltrao
It's a classic catch-22. Increasingly, funding consists of large grants to established researchers with stellar track records. However, to become established and build a track record, you need funding - which you can't get. I'd actually like to see postdocs desert academia en masse; let's see where the big bosses would be without their slave labour. - Neil Saunders
I've always wondered how science would work with a more active 'union' for PhD students and/or PostDocs .... if they went on strike how would things pan out ... it's not like public transport employees or a big building project with tight deadlines ... the 'general public' probably wouldn't notice for years. Hence the level of exploitation that occurs (not saying every student/postdoc is exploited, but many are, and I think the lack of any power in a stop-work is a large part of it). - Andrew Perry
I still get a little bugged by the assumption that PhD = career in academia - Deepak
Yeah, I've often wondered how long it would take for anyone to notice if academic researchers went on strike :) - Neil Saunders
Thing is, the rules are different in academia. Basically, if you're not independently-funded, you don't count and are not free to pursue your own agenda. So we end up working for successful group leaders and furthering their careers, rather than our own. I personally think it's wrong that senior researchers get credit for minimal input, solely because they hold the grant, but that's how it is. - Neil Saunders
Neil ... one of the many reasons I wasn't interested in academia. In a good company, you get recognized (as does your manager) when you do well. In academia, it seems like the managers (PIs) get undue credit ... nothing wrong with academic science. I quite envy the freedom from time to time, but there's a lot more - Deepak
@Neil: don't disagree with you, but just to play DA: it's brutal to get and hold onto a lab as a PI, and once you're there it takes all your time and energy just to hang on. (Unless you're one of the silver-spoon Big Shots, but there are a lot more small, struggling labs than big fat ones.) So there's a PI catch-22 as well: you have to take credit for what your lab does, or you get no credit at all. I keep wondering whether Pawel and his freelancing ideas might not be a viable alternative model... - Bill Hooker
@Bill - don't disagree with you either. In theory, a PI is rewarded for their previous hard work, skills in organisation, directing research, mentoring and so on. Sometimes, it even works out like that :) However, I do think we've entered an era where the system actively favours established researchers and actively discriminates against young, early-career scientists. I think it's untenable and would like to see it proved so by people voting with their feet and getting out. - Neil Saunders
I think there's definitely a "rich-get-richer" thing going on. I also think that competition has reached the point -- 7%! -- where we might as well draw names out of a hat. (Sneaky self link: http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/...) There's not much correlation any more between smarts+hard work and success. Something's gotta give. - Bill Hooker
@deepak: One problem is that academic training is done by academics. That's all they know. They aren't prepared to train people for careers in other environments. And as for grad students striking, it's been done, and doesn't really work for reasons mentioned below. Besides, aren't we all in it for the love of discovery? Are you really going to go on strike when your killer experiment you've spent a year setting up is coming to fruition, your bunnies need a bleed, or you need to read galleys? - Todd Harris via twhirl
Todd, I wouldn't disagree with that, but there are more than enough PhDs who move on to industry, where quite frankly I enjoyed the science I did. I think the stike that Neil refers to is people choosing industry over academia - Deepak
That is indeed the action I meant. The whole notion of striking PhDs/postdocs is ridiculous! If your job (any job) is really making you so unhappy, then look elsewhere. I'm acutely aware of "whinging postdoc" syndrome when we explore these issues. I have no time for those "life is so hard in academia" style of blogs. It really isn't. - Neil Saunders
Well, the strike I was referring to was a real strike, not a shift out of academia, but for reasons Todd (and I) have already stated, it wouldn't work, it would have to be a pretty bad situation before things came to that, and despite problems overall most junior scientists do love their work to much to do it. Because of this, it's one less bargaining chip that they have to improve their situation, unlike some other industries. So in reality, I guess a move to industry is a good alternative to a strike ... - Andrew Perry
Especially since it's often a pretty good alternative, and you get to build stuff and often, esp in a small company, get to do some very interesting research - Deepak
I came to this discussion late (ironically because I'm writing yet another grant) but thought I add anyway. I train people in my lab for academics or industry. Most have gone on to industry as it turns out. Since I've worked in both settings its easy for me to make the training fit either option. I try to give the person the chops for either and then let them pick. - Maureen
Since we are talking about alternative career paths it could be worth mentioning that scientific publishing is still growing at a strong pace. I think if I was not happy with research in academia publishing would be the place I would look for an alternative. - Pedro Beltrao
Postdocs: A 1960s invention because they didn't have enough professorships. Lame. Lame. Lame. - Mitchell Tsai
Comments came back today for a .au funding round. A comment directed at a senior researcher with 10 000+ citations was "very good track record but very no recent first author papers". Also last year the Platypus was not exciting, this year the reviewers are so excited they are creaming their pants. Two questions. Who are the idiots who review these grants (I hope it isn’t those who hold 10+ grants)? Are the only things that get funded something that's been big in the media? It appears very short-term hype focused vs long term vision - Mitchell J Stanton-Cook
This is the logical outcome of poorly synchronized boom-bust cycles in funding, training and the availability of scientific careers in any given place. On top of this, since science is now a transnational career possibility, problems are being exacerbated by even more short-sighted policies in other countries. Some interesting comments here: http://bigpicture.typepad.com/... - Heather
Reading this has rather put me off continuing in academia. I like doing research, but I'm not sure if I fancy spending most of my time writing grants if I become successful. Success in research = do less research ? - Michael Barton
Michael, I do think that to an extent it's a choice. I know a few PIs who still write their own code. Even in industry you can choose your track (technical vs. management). Most of my friends are still in the technical track and at least managing large projects if not right in the middle of them. - Deepak
"Success in research = do less research?" Depends in part on the field. A few years ago I started going to occasional math and philosophy meetings (I'm a physicist). I noticed the senior mathematicians and philosophers were a much more interesting and happy bunch than the senior physicists, on average. My eventual theory was that the relatively low level of funding in mathematics and philosophy was actually a boon for these people. Most senior physicists are machines for turning coffee into grants. - Michael Nielsen
@Pedro – yep, I can recommend publishing :-) BTW, we (=Mol Syst Biol) are still looking for a second editor... - Thomas Lemberger
@pedro re: one investigator with 32 grants - I think I read in a follow-up article in Science or Nature a few months ago that they didn't distinguish between types of grants, so that individual actually had a slew of conference grants and not research grants (he is the main organizer for a major series of conferences), so he was an outlier. Still, there are a distinct minority with the majority of research grants, so I don't disagree that the system needs to change.. - Shirley Wu
Nature had that article (Pubmed ID#: 18354436): 32 grants to Andy Robertson, Chief Scientific Officer of the Keystone Symposia; those 32 grants averaged $15,312 a piece. - dsbreak
"In addition, much of the dynamic network behavior may not yet have been surveyed, given that the bulk of the data reported in Isalan et al. were collected in rich media" ... A lot of it is buried in supplementary materials but we tried several experimental conditions. - Pedro Beltrao
That's a cracking paper, went down well as a paper talk in our lab meetings! And yes we noticed a certain name on the author list ;) - Daniel Swan
I've tried to collate all the feedback that was given last time. Any more feedback on this version is welcome. I've outlined the focus of the survey in the first paragraph. - Michael Barton
I've just finished. Looks very good. Looking forwards to see the results. - Pawel Szczesny
'Liked' but I guess not filling it out - can hardly call myself a bioinformatician :) - Cameron Neylon
What Cam said. I "liked" it to give it extra juice here, make sure everyone sees it. - Bill Hooker
Michael was suggesting starting it officially on the 1st of July and let it run for a month before collecting the results and analyzing them. If we get enough numbers maybe the results will be interesting enough to send to a science news sections of some journal (The Scientists, Nature News, ...). If we get a bit of coordinated promotion on the 1st of July it would be great :D - Pedro Beltrao
I'm on holiday on 1 July - can I schedule a 'like' to pop in then? - Cameron Neylon
Send me a reminder, or post one here, and I'll blog the effort. Won't do much but every little bit helps. Betcha Jonathan Eisen would blog it too, and he has way more readers than me. Ditto Bora. - Bill Hooker
@Egon. I understand your point but I had to try and limit this question to a small subset of categories, so I used those from Bioinformatics. With too many, the analysis becomes less significant as it's spread out over a broader range. I know it's tenuous but metabolomics could be put under Systems Biology? - Michael Barton
After discussion with Pedro, we also thought it might be interesting to release all the data under a CC license so anyone can contribute to the analysis. Have to update the disclaimer at the top though. - Michael Barton
Well, in feel that bioinformatics is not just DNA/RNA sequence stuff, but the full biochemistry, but I recognize the thing that people say bioinformatics is blast++. A shame, really, because I thought the field recognized by now that an organism is more than it's blueprint. - Egon Willighagen
Done. I skipped the "bioinformatics tools apart from software development" - because I mostly write my own; and the "web applications" - because there's just way too many. Maybe a select list and then list up to 3 "other" would have been better. - Neil Saunders
"At LIFESTYLE PETS, we are particularly concerned about animal and bioethics, and continually study and discuss these issues both internally and with leading experts". .....OK...that's reassuring, ....not ! - SciPhu
Sorry to ruin your fun, Ntino, but come on...the guy registered the site under his real name. - Mr. Gunn
I think it means that bloggers get access to papers before publication like science journalists do, provided they don't break the news before the official release? Can someone clarify? - Neil Saunders
They have done that unofficially in the past, so looks like they are formalizing part of that process - Deepak
@Neil Yeah, you can't blog about it until after the embargo date has passed. - Euan
This is great. Levels the field for bloggers wanting to work as science journalists. - Pedro Beltrao
"Bloggers wishing to apply for inclusion in our press list should do so through our contact form including links to 6 blog postings written by them in the last 6 months discussing the content of primary research papers. " - Mr. Gunn
Very cool! Thanks for the heads up :) - Ricardo Vidal
Yes, it is already happening to some degree. I'm a blogger and PLoS sends me the same email announcing upcoming papers that they send to professional journalists. Often times they attach the real deal PDF to the article. - Kambiz Kamrani
I've been thinking for a little while that eventually teams of PIs would get together and hire someone to handle the actual writing part of doing science, this goes for grants as well as publications, and is particularly relevant as the number of US scientists for whom English is not their first language increases. - Mr. Gunn
I agree Mr Gunn. Would be wonderful to have Biowriters. - Michael Barton
I sent the original link to my sister after she ran some kind of phylogenetics program as root. Ran for 2 days, wiped a load of system files, and the system wouldn't boot anymore. - Michael Barton
Rafael says he would like some feedback on what we most dislike about Sciencedirect, Scopus, etc. Let me be the first to mention the 255+ character URLs in science direct(which breaks Connotea's bookmarking) and the lack of a "this article's entry on pubmed" link on the article pages. Anything else? - Mr. Gunn
William, thanks for the feedback. Based on your post, I would be interested to find out scientific community's views about accessing ScienceDirect via web services and developing applications that can be shared/used by other subscribers. - Rafael Sidi
Rafael, I'll send you a note on that one offline. You can guess what my view is on this. SD etc are treasure troves of information. By thinking about it as a service, Elsevier can really help the community and hopefully there will be people who will develop some killer apps - Deepak
Maybe SD should change the final name of the PDF that is generated for saving. Sometimes it is fine to edit it by hand before saving, but sometimes something different than sdarticle.pdf would be easier. - PauloNuin
Rafael, CISTI is always keen on using web services - I emailed you with more info. - Richard Akerman
There's another provider that provides "fulltext.pdf" - forget which one. I don't care too much since my PDFs go straight to CiteULike and are renamed, but if they didn't, I'd be annoyed. - Neil Saunders
Elsevier gives the fulltext.pdf, Oxford gives the number of the first page. BMC is the best. - PauloNuin
Improvement for ScienceDirect's PDF naming is on the way. - Rafael Sidi
That's awesome, Rafael. What about rewriting/shortening the URLs and adding links from the sciencedirect page to the article's entry on Pubmed, CiteULike, etc? - Mr. Gunn
William, we'll look into shortening the URL and other links too. Currently we are linking from article page to www.scopus.com and www.2collab.com (yes, they are both Elsevier products) - Rafael Sidi
Why do we need a closed science search? I can't access it unless my clients use it so tend to stick with PubMed and Scholar. I can find science blogs on Google Blogs search. Disease information on Kosmix. What's the extra value in paying for something? - Sally Church
That's exactly what I'm talking about, Rafael. I see that and think, "Oh, they're just linking to their own sites. That's what I would expect from a big corporation." You can't use the "crowd" for your advantage. You have to be a part of it, first, and small startups tend to understand this better, which leads to them innovating more rapidly, which leads to people who spent time creating the content in the first place getting more value from it. - Mr. Gunn
I know Elsevier has lots of competent engineers and more money to throw at this than a little startup, but unless you start with the right ideas first, you'll get nowhere. Elsevier needs something like Yahoo Berkeley http://www.yahooresearchberkel... - Mr. Gunn
i don't like in all of life science search engines absence of citations links: who cited this paper (who, how many times and when...) - it's should be incorporate in the search and freely available - Alexey
There is - I read about it on a blog some months ago. May even have been published - Bioinformatics? Can't find it in the bookmarks though - will get back to you. - Neil Saunders
I find JANE and eTBlast very helpful when looking for reviewers for mss, and I think they'd both be useful in finding journals by looking for similar papers. Neither of them give any info about impact factor or rejection rates though. - Bill Hooker
Neil, thanks a lot, exactly that is what I'm looking for. Tried it out with my paper, it gives pretty good suggestions like Journal of Clinical Investigation and Tissue Engineering, PNAS, American Journal of Physiology, and my favorite: Zhongguo yi xue ke xue yuan xue bao. Acta Academiae Medicinae Sinicae - Attila Csordas
I second etBlast. Helps find reviewers and journals - Michael Barton
Just used Jane on an a current in progress publication. The journal suggestion and author suggestions are interesting as a) it suggests quite clearly the lab the work has come from but b) suggests journals which are almost universally ones the lab in question has published in. So is it just a small field or are the athors already publishing in the correct journal? ;) - Daniel Swan
JANE may include Eigenfactor data in the near future, so keep an eye out for that. I think the two will go together like chocolate and peanut butter. - Rebecca Holz
But if anyone has suggestions to make this a better workflow: please let me know!! - Jan Aerts
I haven't folded to peer pressure and tried git yet ... but I can see it's inevitable. - Andrew Perry
@Neil. Surely a priority FriendFeed feature will be to group discussion by the same URL. - Michael Barton
@Mike absolutely, often discussed in the FriendFeed room. - Neil Saunders
I'm also resisting git. You know, SVN is the new CVS. Git is the new SVN. Bazaar is the new Git. Mercurial is...what? Give me one compelling reason to move from SVN. However, it's inevitable since all my smart FriendFeed friends rave about it :) - Neil Saunders
It was easy for me. I wasn't using anything and seeing github in action pretty much did it for me. And to add to that list, wasn't CVS the new RCS (the first system I used) - Deepak
Following this discussion, tinyurl.com/3knuma, I wonder if an objective for biogang could be getting resources for people to host bio-related mashups and applications. For the one person it could be hard to get hold of a server to host some code. A larger company might be willing to donate a server for example? - Michael Barton
Quick prototyping doesn't cost much. There are so many developers around here prototyping ideas, most of whom are using some colocation facility or slicehost or AWS to test out ideas. The only company that might consider this is Google, but even they will suggest trying out the App Engine, which has its limitations. That said this is a business opportunity, especially for a cloud hosting provider which understands the academic market - Deepak
So if you had to pick a cloud computing service for scientists to dump all their data, run applications and also analyse their data, which one would you choose? I have been looking at AWS, Engine Yard, Google App Engine (although it still looks/sounds gimmicky) and I recently came across Aster Data, which looks very impressive (or maybe that's just the PR!). Decisions, decisions..... - Paul Bacchus
Disclaimer: I start a new job at AWS tomorrow, but there is a good reason for that. It offers maximum flexibility, and multiple components . In the end it depends on what you want to do. If you're a Rails person take a look at Engine Yard. If you're a Python/Django person and don't mind building apps a certain way, consider App Engine. For most scientific applications, AWS is your best choice, because of EC2, which gives you elastic virtual machines which you can configure your way - Deepak
Good luck Deepak to your new job. I am curious how will you cover Google's related efforts from now on as you will be working at an explicit Google competitor. - Attila Csordas
Attila. Thanks!! I've always self-policed. For example, there are a lot of things I could have written about pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine and companies in the space, but they were either partners, competitors or I was privy to confidential information. Essentially, if it is a general topic, or something that furthers the field, I write about it. If it is specific to my views, I am likely to write about it. If there is ambiguity, then I don't - Deepak
Indeed, congrats on the new job. I am currently writing the specification on what I want – actually, what other people want based on their feedback – but I am not limited to any programming language or framework at the minute. Do you know who/where I could find out more about AWS? Thanks. - Paul Bacchus
Paul ... Thanks. Best place to start - aws.amazon.com. Signing up for the services, forums, etc is free, and there is a pretty good O'Reilly book as well. Quite a few blog posts on how to set up EC2, etc floating around as well - Deepak
This post sums up DTC-testing so nicely. I have commented on it and I am very much looking forward to the continuation of this discussion... - SciPhu
And the discussion has continued. What do you think, is this statement (from The Steve Sherpa) always valid: "SNPs+ Interpretation IS medicine" ? - SciPhu
I think the more interesting question is "Why is"The Gene Blowhard^H^H^H^H Sherpa" so concerned at labeling it medicine?" It's hard to not get the impression that he's saying this just so it falls under something he can bill for. He's just being an attention whore at this point anyways. - Mr. Gunn
Here's Daniel MacArthurs response, - a good one !!: "By that definition, I'm a clinician, and so is anyone else doing modern genetic research, genetic genealogy, or a host of other activities that are manifestly not medicine. This sort of statement gives the impression that you're just trying to re-define anything you're interested in as being the exclusive preserve of the medical establishment." - SciPhu
Shouldn't the title be CATG-fight. Ha Ha Ha!!!1! Oh dear... - Michael Barton
and all pharma company microarray labs should be CLIA certified then (they aren't for good reason) - Deepak
Here's something from a reply from the Sherpa: ..."...If your provider/SNP company can’t guarantee accurate follow up, then you shouldn’t receive the testing.....". Although that is a bit too black and white, I must admit that medical follow-up is a weakness with DTC-testing, what do you think ? - SciPhu
SciPhu, I think I'm done with Mr. Sherpa. At least until he stops the attention-whoring and ex cathedra pronouncements and acts like he's actually interested in a dialogue. Why would he be interested in a dialogue anyways? He's "been in this business for 20 years" and doesn't need to answer to people like us, who haven't had his training and experience and clearly don't understand the issues. - Mr. Gunn
Mr. Gunn, I see what you mean, the sad thing is that it's people acting like that who get "independently wealthy" or whatever his expression was - SciPhu
if he's really just doing this for kicks, I don't think he'd be reacting this way. - Mr. Gunn
Hi Deepak, nice post, when it comes to a more distributed and less centralised annotations of genomic databases, you have to mention DAS / BioDAS http://www.biomedcentral.com/1... - Duncan Hull
Duncan, good point. At some point, I need to compile all the resources and figure out which ones are actually any use. Any other recommendations? - Deepak
Don't forget that NCBI has quite a reasonable API: eutils (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/en...). It gets a lot of use in programming libraries (e.g. Bioperl) but for some reason, doesn't get much publicity or usage in web applications, mashups etc. - Neil Saunders
@Duncan I wondered if there is a recent paper using Biodas ? On my side, I've been trying to use the one from UCSC/Genome-Browser but the results where unuseable (not enough verbose, information missing, etc...) and I then went back to their anonymous mysql server. - Pierre
I like your comparison with Wikipedia. I guess Wikipedia works because it scales well by distributing curation of information across many users. Would be nice if NCBI/EBI could do this. My impression though is that many scientists would initially look down their nose at this, and would need a good use case to demonstrate the potential. - Michael Barton
I wonder if there is any usability/adoption data on the effect of introducing a common RSS logo/button, which was a similar initiative. Will a universal "Edit" button actually encourage more people to edit wiki's ... and is this always a good thing ...? (ie. if the button was *too* successful it could trigger something like Usenets "Eternal September", where the influx of AOL users was blamed on the"degradation of standards of discourse". I doubt that would happen though, since there is no IE support ... yet). - Andrew Perry
Doesn't work on OpenWetWare yet ... I think they need to install the UniversalEditButton MediaWiki Extension. - Andrew Perry
