Method-centered digital communities on protocols.io for fast-paced scientific innovation.

F1000Res

Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA.

Published: September 2016

AI Article Synopsis

  • The Internet has transformed communication among scientists, allowing for online interactions beyond traditional conferences, but knowledge sharing about new methods often remains limited to academic publications.
  • Emerging fields like virology are facing challenges in disseminating new techniques, like metagenomics, which are critical for understanding viral communities but are typically confined to a few specialized labs.
  • To address these issues, the platform protocols.io has been developed, featuring VERVENet, a virology community forum that enables researchers to share protocols, connect with peers, and access updated literature to foster collaboration and innovation.

Article Abstract

The Internet has enabled online social interaction for scientists beyond physical meetings and conferences. Yet despite these innovations in communication, dissemination of methods is often relegated to just academic publishing. Further, these methods remain static, with subsequent advances published elsewhere and unlinked. For communities undergoing fast-paced innovation, researchers need new capabilities to share, obtain feedback, and publish methods at the forefront of scientific development. For example, a renaissance in virology is now underway given the new metagenomic methods to sequence viral DNA directly from an environment. Metagenomics makes it possible to "see" natural viral communities that could not be previously studied through culturing methods. Yet, the knowledge of specialized techniques for the production and analysis of viral metagenomes remains in a subset of labs.  This problem is common to any community using and developing emerging technologies and techniques. We developed new capabilities to create virtual communities in protocols.io, an open access platform, for disseminating protocols and knowledge at the forefront of scientific development. To demonstrate these capabilities, we present a virology community forum called VERVENet. These new features allow virology researchers to share protocols and their annotations and optimizations, connect with the broader virtual community to share knowledge, job postings, conference announcements through a common online forum, and discover the current literature through personalized recommendations to promote discussion of cutting edge research. Virtual communities in protocols.io enhance a researcher's ability to: discuss and share protocols, connect with fellow community members, and learn about new and innovative research in the field.  The web-based software for developing virtual communities is free to use on protocols.io. Data are available through public APIs at protocols.io.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5506532PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.9453.2DOI Listing

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