Thanks for taking that on Bill. I was intrigued by your idea of a scientific networking site and when academia.edu was suggested, hopeful that it might fit the bill. I tried to check it out, and my enthusiasm was reduced by the appearance that it was structured mostly around org-charting departments, which isn't especially exciting. But I was still hopeful it might be flexible enough to connect people with regards to their research systems and methodologies, so I was disappointed when I discovered that as a consultant who works with university and government units but isn't solely affiliated with one, my email address didn't match their acceptable list. Now that you've taken the time to contact and clarify, I'll try the "independent researcher" approach and see what happens.
Here's what I *hope* I will find: the ability to "tag" myself with a range of disciplines in a non-hierarchical fashion, e.g. "ecology", "remote sensing", "landscape analysis", plus the ability to tag myself according to non-hierarchical themes, e.g. "shorebirds" "semi-arid vegetation", "land-use". That done, I'd like to be able to do simple queries to see who else fits multiple or a few of those tags, and follow their feeds with regards to interesting papers, research ideas, and so on. Here's hoping; thanks Bill for following up. Hugh
I had a bit of correspondence with Richard Price at Academia.edu who assures me that the concerns about some scientists not being eligible to join is not valid. Here are some parts of our correspondence, which I have rearranged to make it more coherent, and added some comments in square brackets: "We do encourage researchers in government labs to sign up. They can add their government lab as a university. Los Alamos National Laboratory is on Academia.edu at http://lanl.academia.edu/. [The Portuguese fisheries lab was added yesterday] "We are going to make it clearer on the registration form that other institutions are welcomed too. "Anyone is welcome to join as an independent researcher. Currently they have to type in 'Independent Researcher' into the University box on the sign up form." He also made it clear that they are revising their forms to make these provisions clearer. Bill Silvert
-- Hugh Stimson / 778.373.1024 / hughstimson.org
