FACILITATING EARLY INFORMATION SHARING IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH VIA SOCIAL NETWORKS Research Proposal Presentation Devipsita Bhattacharya

Agenda  Research Background  My-Plant.org  Google My-Plant.org  OpenWetware.org  Future Directions

Research Background  Research Lifecycle  Information sharing during the research lifecycle  Reluctance to share? Loss of ownership?  Role of social networking

My-Plant.org and Social Network Colleague Relationships Clade – Based Groups

Website Activity of Interest  Creation and/or Update of a forum posting  Reply to a forum posting  Addition of an image to the Clade gallery  File upload to the Clade homepage  Creation and/or Update of a tagged clade wall post  Reply to a tagged clade wall post  User Sign In  User registering to a Clade  User sending/accepting a colleague invitation  Visitors viewing a given Clade or its sub-pages

Research Directions  Conduct an empirical study of social network by probing the network constructed using the user activity in a clade and colleague relationships. Two social networks :  the explicit clade-centric and colleague-centric networks  the implicit networks arising out of the website activities  Identify the various clusters and points of interest  Determine the social capital, bonding and bridging factors for the participating nodes (either clade or user)  For the user-based networks, the centrality measures - Degree, Betweenness and Eigen vector  Pose major questions  Which members have most influence over others?  Does the community break down into smaller groups (apart from clade groups) and if so what are they?  Which connections are most crucial to the functioning of a group?

My-Plant.org Google Analytics  Google Analytics reports:  Traffic Sources – Direct traffic, through referral sources such as search engines, blog posts  Visitors – Visitor information such as loyalty, location and language  Content – Pages viewed, top landing and exit pages  Answer questions related to website traffic:  How many visitors are coming to My-Plant.org?  Is the content effective? Do users exit the website after visiting a page or do they continue browsing?  How frequently are users visiting the website?  How did the visitors hear about My-Plant.org?  What is the website navigation path followed by visitors?

User Browsing Patterns  Navigation Path  Using Google Analytics reports generated between July 28th and October 4th, 2010  Four major browsing patterns  Homepage Traffic  User-related Traffic  Clade-related Traffic  Help page Traffic  Inferences

OpenWetware.org  Information sharing website for biology and biological engineering  Developed in 2005 by students from Drew Andy’s bioengineering and Tom Ford’s bioinformatics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology  Website content Resources – Reference materials Materials – Materials related to biological engineering research Protocols – Execution steps, guidelines. Labs and Groups – Listings of various research groups and institutions

Website structure and Data Sharing  Wikipedia structure  Wiki pages for materials, protocols, resources, labs and groups  Page creation and editing  Creation requires registration  Edits to a page a tracked historically)  Viewing grants are provided to all website visitors  Wiki page can be tagged by its editor  Homepage hosting for institutes/labs to host their homepages  Helps implement social organization for scientists within a given lab  Opportunity for each lab member to log their contribution to the lab website directly  Additional lab materials can be linked to the laboratory website  The website content is licensed under the Creative Commons License, “Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported”

Research  Comparative study with my-plant.org  Social network construction

Summary  Research Lifecycle  Role of social networks in information sharing between researchers  My-plant.org and social structure  Google Analytics for My-Plant  Openwetware.org and comparative study

Questions ?