Many thanks to all of you who responded, both on and off list. I spent the
afternoon trying out the various suggestions, and the best for my purposes
seems to be academia.edu which many people recommended. The others seem to
be suffering from newness and there were a number of inappropriate messages
flying around. For example, on one list someone broadcast a message to the
entire network of 14,000 saying "Can anybody help me?" without specifying
what the field was, and I found myself getting messages not related to the
groups I signed up with. Some have a way to go before reaching critical
size, for example the Fish Ecology group on ResearchGATE has 5 members.
There is even a group for fans of a particular athlete, so it seems as
though these networks have not progressed much beyond the Facebook model.
Unfortunately the academic orientation of some of these networks may
discourage some scientists from joining. Academia.edu is strictly for
academics, and while I qualify through minor affiliation with the University
of the Algarve, a government scientist wrote me to say "I visited
www.academia.edu which looks interesting, but I am not currently an
academic, so it didn't seem relevant."
Anyway I have signed up for these networks and if I learn anything of
interest I will pass on the news. I can see a lot of potential value here,
but unless the people you want to communicate with are members, there isn't
much point.
Bill Silvert
PS - Here is something I found amusing. I own a small bistro which has its
own email address, so to check the kind of messages that these networks send
out when you recommend new members, I gave academia.edu this address. Soon
afterwards the message came through, "William Silvert added your name to
Academia.edu, the global directory of academics and graduate students. We
checked your department directory, and it looks like you are an
academic/graduate student." I am sure that the bartender and waitress are
very flattered (although since the name of the bistro is Centro de
Investigação Gastronómica perhaps that was confusing!). Still, if a bistro
can join, maybe you don't really have to be an academic.
----- Original Message -----
From: William Silvert
To: List FISHFOLK ; Scientific forum on fish and fisheries ; ECOLOG-L List
Sent: quinta-feira, 19 de Novembro de 2009 13:45
Subject: Scientific Networking
I've joined a few of the various social networks and find them of little
professional value, although I have met up with some old friends and
schoolmates. However it strikes me that this kind of networking could be of
considerable value to scientists, and I am posting to enquire whether any
suitable networks exist. It may of course be that I simply don't know how to
use the networks I belong to.
It would be handy to be able to classify one's friends/colleagues by
interest and to be able to post messages to various specific interest
groups. This seems similar to the idea of lists on Facebook, but I have not
yet found any way to send messages specifically to one or more of these
lists.
Some of these interest groups already exist as formal groups of course, I am
sure that there must be several organised groups dealing with climate
change. On the other hand I doubt that there are groups specifically
interested in vibrio or in ctenophores, so it would have to be an ad hoc
group. I envisage a system where individual scientists would define their
own interest areas and be able to communicate easily with colleagues with
overlapping interests. For example, if I am working on the possibility that
pollution is depressing oxygen levels in some region and this is encouraging
the dominance of jellyfish, I could send it to people I know whom I have
classified as interested in pollution, in hypoxia and in gelatinous
zooplankton, and perhaps to others working in the same region.
Of course some of the existing networks are ideal for a few scientists. I
find Twitter absolutely useless, but for astronomers searching for comets it
must be a fantastic tool.
Anyway, I would welcome any comments and advice on ways in which these
modern networking tools can be used for science. Email lists have certainly
been useful, but I find that in some areas they are too narrowly defined and
structured to work well.
Bill Silvert
