I should be putting something together for the actual sessions I am notionally involved in helping running but this being a very interactive meeting perhaps it is better to leave things to very last minute. Currently I am at a hotel at LAX awaiting an early flight tomorrow morning.

A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement: Alright, in isolation this doesn’t look like much, read through both David’s post and the comments, and then come back to Maxine’s,Â

This post is an opinion piece and not a rigorous objective analysis. It is fair to say that I am on the record as and advocate of the principles behind PLoS ONE and am also in favour of post publication peer review and this should be read in that light. [ ed I’ve also modified this slightly from the original version because I got myself mixed up in an Excel spreadsheet] To me, anonymous peer review is, and always has been, broken.

So Ian Mulvaney asked, and as my solution did not fit into the margin I thought I would post here. Following on from the two rants of a few weeks back and many discussions at Scifoo I have been thinking about how scientists might be persuaded to make more use of social web based tools. What does it take to get enough people involved so that the network effects become apparent.

My aim is to email this to all the email addresses that I can find on the relevant sites over the next week or so, but feel free to diffuse more widely if you feel it is appropriate. Dear Developer(s) I am writing to ask your support in undertaking a critical analysis of the growing number of tools being developed that broadly fall into the category of social networking or collaborative tools for scientists.

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 Network, OpenWetWare, and others.