Academia has a reputation for being a bit of a closed world, a walled garden of knowledge where secrets are jealously guarded. But the truth is that collaboration is at the very heart of research and scientific discovery, and that for science to advance, researchers need to get together, compare notes, disagree, and have their ideas challenged and built upon by others. Often this happens naturally – like in the cafeteria where PhD students will chat about their projects – but in such a hyper-specialized environment, chances are that people who share your particular research interests cannot be found in the same institution or even the same country. What then?

In the same way that social media has revolutionised personal and professional communication and created dynamic global conversations, platforms like Mendeley now bring academics together in groups formed around those research interests, and the implications of that are tremendous for making science more open and accelerating the pace of discovery.This is why the team here at Mendeley is particularly interested in gaining genuine, real-time insight into research collaboration.

Mendeley is involved in several research projects. Particularly fruitful has been an on-going exchange of researchers and Mendeley staff between our London HQ and the Know-Center at Graz University of Technology in Austria. All projects aim to contribute to the improved use of the wealth of Mendeley data for the benefit of our users and the scientific community in general.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this recent investigation of research collaboration started as a Hack Day project between Mendeley staff and a visiting researcher from the Know-Center/TU Graz in the context of the TEAM project (http://team-project.tugraz.at) which is coordinated by the Knowledge Management Institute of the TU Graz. Sebastian Pöhlmann (Insights and Analytics Manager) and Piotr Drozd (Community and Business Intelligence Analyst) teamed up with Peter Kraker (PhD student, Know-Center/TU Graz) to visualise cross-country collaboration on the Mendeley platform.

An interactive map has been created that aims to shed some light into the intensity of international research collaboration across different countries. Considering that using Mendeley groups is optional for our users, we are excited to have data on 113 countries. For each of those we show the continent, the rank by user count, the number of connected countries and the proportion of foreign (= international) connections.

By browsing the map or making a selection from the list, you can visualise the connections between researchers for any given country. A connection between two countries is established if at least one of each country’s researchers are members of the same Mendeley group. Of the over 200,000 research groups on Mendeley, we’ve selected private groups with at least two members, as that tends to be the most collaborative group type. Our staff is also very active on the platform so we’ve further excluded groups owned by Mendeley staff  and connections where Mendeley staff are involved. We have further excluded countries with less than 10 total connections.

Browsing the map and the data has produced some interesting insights:

• Among BRICS countries, China, India and Russia have a high proportion of international connections whereas Brazil and South Africa seem somewhat more internally focused
• Generally speaking, North America, Europe, and Australia are very well connected, whereas Asia and South America are somewhat lagging behind.
• There are a few small countries that are very internationalized: Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, and Denmark. Interestingly, these countries are also at the top of the KOF Index of Globalization: http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/static/pdf/rankings_2012.pdf

This is early days, but we hope that by learning more about how our users collaborate with each other, we can continue to develop the best tools to help them work even more efficiently. And by sharing some of the insights on Mendeley Labs we want to contribute our part of the picture to the general knowledge of how research works.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. What does collaboration mean to you and how would you go about measuring and visualizing it?

Back in 2006, Moshe Pritsker thought to use video technology to capture and transmit the intricacies of life science research, facilitating both the understanding and reproduction of experiments and techniques. This idea of “letting scientists look over each other’s shoulders” led to the launch of JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which is peer reviewed and PubMed-indexed. As a scientific journal, it has an editorial board and hierarchical structure, and ensures consistent quality of its video content by maintaining a network of professional videographers spread across major science centres. Scientists from leading institutions participate by submitting video articles that visualize their experiments.

As science advances, processes and tools also become more complex. Procedures and techniques such as growing stem cells are tremendously complicated and difficult to accurately follow with just a set of written instructions, and visiting labs in person can be a very expensive alternative beyond the resources of many researchers. This challenge of poor experiment reproducibility is what JoVE tries to address, claiming that traditional written and static picture-based print journals are no longer sufficient to accurately convey the intricacies of modern research. Translating findings from the bench to clinical therapies rely on the rapid transfer of knowledge within the research community.

This month’s issue features an article by Connors et al of Massachusetts Eye & Ear and Harvard Medical School, who have developed an audio-based virtual environment simulator that uses audio cues and a video game context to build cognitive maps of three-dimensional spaces and help blind people improve their navigation skills. Other videos include a new non-invasive method being developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School for measuring brain metabolism in new-born babies, and a demonstration of how a biopolymer gel derived from polysaccharides found in brown algae can help patients with heart failure.

There are also other companies operating in the scientific video space, but what they offer is a looser user-generated environment. One of the most successful of those is SciVee, which is backed by the Public Library of Science and features videos that sit alongside traditional journal papers.

So is this the new frontier? Are we actually looking at a situation where most researchers will feel comfortable communicating with their peers using video? Has the scientific community truly given its blessing to such new approaches to science communication? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

There’s been a lot of buzz around “Citizen Science” lately, so it’s only fair to ask whether the hype is really justified or if it’s more of a gimmick or passing fad. Taking some time to look at the projects that have already harnessed the power of the masses to advance scientific research, however, it’s difficult not to get excited.

Citizen Science, as the name suggests, is where ordinary citizens volunteer their brainpower, time, and other resources such as spare computer power, to help with research projects. From asking people to count squirrels in their backyard to encouraging you to build your own laser harp, there literally is something out there to suit everyone’s abilities, resources, and disposition. Getting involved can mean something as simple as donating some spare computer time; ClimatePrediction.net, for example, aims to produce predictions of the Earth’s climate up to 2300 by asking users to download and run a model program when their computers are on but not being used to full capacity.

For those looking to get more involved, however, there is the opportunity to hunt for stellar clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy, identify and measure the orbits of Near Earth Objects , or help researchers at Berkeley in their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence through the SETI@home project.

Closer to home you can view and classify pictures from the hundreds of camera traps set throughout the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, monitor the status of bat populations, measure the evolution of tropical storms, or help survey scallop numbers in the New York Bight by analysing undersea images captured by a robot submarine named Dora. Even the humanities need not feel neglected, as nearly 800,000 people signed up so far to help the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford increase access to their music collections by transcribing information from digitized sheet music. Sites like Zooniverse aggregate the largest and most popular projects, and you only need to register once to participate in as many as you like.

But while a lot of these projects only require people to view, interpret and process images, some actually ask you to actively solve puzzles, effectively turning scientific questions into games.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a substance used by our cells to translate genetic information from our DNA. Folding and shape-shifting allows RNA to control cells in a predictable way, and this has huge medical and biological implications that are still to be discovered. This is where EteRNA come in: It’s a game where you design RNAs, which are then scored according to how well they fold. The best examples are added to the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs in the world. Similarly, Phylo is a game where participants align DNA sequences by shifting puzzle pieces as a way of achieving Multiple Sequence Alignments. A sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA to identify regions of similarity. From such an alignment, biologists can trace the source of certain genetic diseases. Traditionally, alignment algorithms use computationally complex heuristics to align the sequences but this is prohibitively expensive; by taking data pre-aligned by a heuristic algorithm and abstracting it into manipulating patterns consisting of coloured shapes, the game harnesses the natural human ability to recognize patterns and solve visual problems efficiently.

This is something that research institutions and charities such as Cancer Research UK are keen to capitalize upon. They are teaming up with games designers and computer programmers from tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google to find a way to gamify the search for DNA mutations which lead to cancer. The data needs to be analysed by eye, as computers cannot identify the subtle differences which give the clue as to what the genetic causes of cancers might be. They are aiming to have the project up and running this summer

So it might be that this democratization of science, opening it up to ordinary citizen participation from all over the world, could aid the discovery of a cure for cancer, uncover the secrets of the universe, and help us advance knowledge in all areas of human knowledge. What do you think about it? Have you been involved in such a project or considered crowdsourcing as a way to advance your research? Or have you participated in these or any other projects as a citizen scientist? We’d love to hear your experiences, so do leave a comment or join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.

In science it is, anyway. As Eric S. Lander- one of the eleven winners of the first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences – explains, this is a “staggering” amount of money for a scientist. Lander is a leader of the Human Genome Project, and in an interview quoted in the New York Times he told of how he planned on using the prize money to help pay for new approaches to teaching biology online.

The winners of what is now the world’s richest academic prize for medicine and biology – more than twice the amount of the Nobel Prize – work mostly in areas advancing cancer research, but Cornelia I. Bargmann’s work on nervous system and behaviour was also recognised, as was Dr. Shinya Yamanaka’s groundbreaking research on developing stem cells.

This follows from the establishment of the Fundamental Physics Prize – also worth $3 million – awarded to 9 scientists last July. It’s the brainchild of Russian Billionaire investor, entrepreneur and philanthropist Yuri Milner, who himself was a Physics student. Inaugural winners includedAlexei Kitaev,  Maxim Kontsevich, and Ashoke Sen.

Previous winners will help make decisions on future awards, and both prizes – as well as a $100,000 award to honour promising young researchers – will now be awarded annually to people who “think big, take risks and have made a significant impact on our lives.”

But while the physics prize was funded exclusively by Mr Milner, who personally chose the first batch of winners, for the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences he partnered with a select group of Internet tycoons. Apple chairman Arthur D. Levison helped in the selection process while Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki – founder of genetics company 23andMe were also involved and donated towards the $33 million prize fund.

Mark Zuckerberg told GigaOM that he believes society needs more hero scientist, researchers and engineers: “The things that we talk about in the media and the things the market rewards has a big influence on what the next generation of people growing up will choose to do and I think it’s really important that a lot of the smartest people go and choose to solve these problems and go into these lines of work.”

In a world obsessed with film, music and sports celebrities, the goal is to “move the needle” of public awareness and give scientists who have significantly contributed to the advancement of human knowledge a chance at the limelight. The foundation’s website will soon be accepting nominations for the next batch of prizes, and anyone can send one in. There are no limits as to age or how many people can share a prize. Also, people can win more than once. “If you’re Einsten,” said Mr Milner, “you will be getting three.”

Do you think that prizes such as the Life Sciences Breakthrough and the Fundamental Physics Prize have the potential to inspire more young people to pursue a scientific career? Is it fair to single out researchers for such large prizes or would it be more productive to fund their area of research directly rather than individuals? Does the fact that most winners are male and from the US represent a problem? What are your thoughts on the researchers who have been recognized so far and their contribution to science? Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment below or joining the conversation on Twitter or Facebook.

Think of all of the ways you connect with others and discover new information online. How many of those platforms do you use for research? How do you keep up with the speed and amount of research that’s being created, discovered, and disseminated? How can we apply the implications of today’s open and real-time research to advance scientific discovery?

As part of Social Media Week, Mendeley is hosting an event to address these questions together. Registration is free. Bring friends. Meet new friends.

Let’s get offline and talk about how you, your research, and the web intersect.

Join us at the Google NY headquarters (foursquare id: 15816790) on Tuesday, February 8th at 3-5pm for “Research Gone Social: Leveraging the Web to Advance Scientific Discovery”, a distributed global event featuring more than 7,500 attendees across 200 events.

Please RSVP here and include the #smwresearch #smw11 #smwnyc hashtag for posts, tweets, pictures, etc.

Speakers include:

Chris Wiggins, HackNY co-founder, Associate Professor of Applied Math at Columbia University
Gabriel Willow, Urban ecologist, Science & Learning Specialist at theWildLab
Margaret Smith, Librarian for Physical Sciences at New York University
Jan Reichelt, Mendeley co-founder

Jessica Hammer, a Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Fellow at Columbia University, shares her candid thoughts about Mendeley. Thank you, Jessica, for taking the time to chat! You’ve helped us to kick off what may be a brand new series of Mendeley stories – as told by our users themselves.

Tell us about your research interests
Officially I study psychology, but games, stories, community, race, gender, learning, technology and creativity are all part of my larger research interests. My focus is on investigating how technology interventions influence the way that people think, feel and behave.  Right now, I’m working on how games can help people adopt new ways of thinking about race and gender.

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You’ve got some spare time this Wednesday and Thursday? Then come to beautiful Paris, do some Christmas shopping, and meet us at LeWeb ’09. Yes, great news: Mendeley is one of the 16 finalists and we are demoing Mendeley on Wednesday (and if we make it into the final-final then also on Thursday).

What is LeWeb ’09? It’s one of the biggest (if not the biggest) start-up competition for Europe’s start-ups to present their products and technologies to some of the most influential players in the market, including Royalty! The list of speakers is truly impressive, and the high-profile judges include entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and representatives from companies such as Sun and Microsoft.

Besides having the chance to present Mendeley and show what we are up to, it will be a great event to mingle with other companies and founders and share start-up experiences (and maybe get some free sandwiches).

And who knows, maybe we will be lucky enough to follow up on our success at Plugg.eu’s “Start-up of Year 2009″ and TechCrunch Europas “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” awards? At the very least, it will be a lot of fun! Oh là là!

I was doing some research to see which universities have the most Mendeley users, when I thought it might be fun to see how these universities have grown day by day, over the last three months. The chart below shows just that: the top 10 Mendeley universities, and the growth in user base in each of these from August 1st to November 1st.

Watch out Stanford! Cambridge is right behind you…

“It has been described as internet dating for inventors” – well, here at Mendeley we didn’t know that we were doing this kind of stuff, but in any case it’s fantastic news that yesterday Benjamin Cohen from Channel 4 News, one of the UK’s leading news channels, reported on Mendeley! The three minute report names James Dyson, probably Britain’s most famous inventor, and Mendeley as exemplary innovators in the UK’s recovering economy.

Besides showing Mendeley in our “tiny office in London” (oh well, start-up life…), Channel 4 News also interviewed Dr. Cameron Neylon, Molecular Biologist at the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, and an Open Science advocate, in front of his mega-super-duper-luxurious four monitor set-up. Thanks Cameron for the nice quotes!

Here’s the write-up, the link to the video, and below you will find the video embedded.

The year 2009 is halfway through and already we’ve seen some great stuff being published, created, and predicted that could have a major impact in the future. Each of the eight items were chosen because they could influence how every one of us communicates, learns, and lives more so than any other discoveries so far in 2009. What’s that? You’re not a science or techie person? It doesn’t matter, you and everyone else are going to be affected because of the work and ideas brought forth below. So, pay attention. We start with some exclusive, never before public news from NASA, very fitting as today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.

1. NASA starts project Nebula (new exclusive information) Nope, this isn’t another space probe. This is the government giving a head nod to cloud computing. They’ve wisely hired a few seasoned Internet entrepreneurs to command the mission at NASA Ames and take NASA data into the cloud. That much has been known since May. Last week I had dinner with Chris Kemp (CIO, NASA Ames) and some of the Nebula team. Here’s what Kemp agreed to reveal publicly for the first time:

”NASA collaborates with hundreds of universities, commercial partners, and other federal and international partners. The NASA Nebula cloud computing platform will dramatically increase the efficiency and productivity of these collaborations.”

How it affects you: If you’re a NASA collaborator or want to become one, then get ready. As for every day citizens, you too will reap the rewards of Nebula via the research performed. There’s also been a lot of speculation that Nebula will power data sets other than just NASA’s, such as data.gov. Is this true? Let’s put it this way. Their focus, for now, is on NASA’s data. The rest is my opinion only: imagine the possibilities if we had a national or even international cloud computing platform. Remember that it was originally a similar government project called ARPANET that gave rise to today’s Internet. This could be BIG for science, tech, and planet Earth.

Hurdles to jump: Kemp and team must first get this rolling with NASA before opening it up to outsiders. And it’s government, so there’s a lot of bureaucracy and red tape to cut through to get this done and costs down. President Obama and Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO), if you’re listening, then help this team out by cutting that tape and give them carte blanche funding to get it done.

More info: Official NASA Nebula website – Follow Nebula on Twitter

2. The ozone has been saved – sort of

Ever ask yourself what the ozone layer and our planet would look like today if we hadn’t passed some of those pesky environmental laws back in the 1980’s? Researchers, led by Paul Newman, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and elsewhere asked “What would have happened to the ozone layer if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been regulated in 1987?” This was an important and difficult to answer question, until this year. I reached Dr. Newman for a comment to let us know the most important message from this research:

“If chlorofluorocarbons had not been regulated by the Montreal Protocol, two-thirds of the ozone layer would have been destroyed by the year 2065 with a consequent increase of surface ultraviolet radiation to extreme levels.”

How it affects you: While the conclusions were based on computer models, the importance of environmental policy cannot be overstated, and now we have proof that policy does work. Oh, and your grandkids will get to play outside in 2065. Even by 2020 it would have been pretty nasty without SPF 3 billion lathered on. Check out these neat simulations, such as the image above.

Hurdles to jump: As you may know, we still have a slight problem with a thing called “Global warming.” Lots to do in order to reduce carbon emissions.

More info: Original study

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