The presentation, entitled “How to win friends and influence people with social media” covers the following topics Why researchers and graduate students use social mediaThepros cons of being an How to build a basic strategy for taking your research onlineEnjoy the video and please share with any colleagues who might be interested. for the start of the talk. Looking forward to your comments!A few weeks ago I was approached by the folks at Petridish.org, asking if I’d be interested in doing a post on their science crowdfunding site. I’m fascinated by crowdfunding and think that it has a huge amount of potential, both as a means of funding science, and as a means of incentivizing science communication – in a world where the public funds your research directly, you have much more incentive to communicate with them about your work. Since I didn’t know much about Petridish.org at the time, I asked if one of their founders would be interested in doing an interview with me instead. Below is that interview, with Petridish.org co-founder Matt Salzberg. More on Matt can be found at the bottom of this post.I have yet to try crowdfunding myself, but if you have any experience with Petridish or any other crowdfunding platform (or thoughts on which platformwill eventually succeed .
Science Power
1. Simple question: what is crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding reflects the power of the internet to pool the collective actions of many small participants to make a larger project happen. In the case of Petridish.org, we help scientists and researchers raise funding for their projects from people who are passionate about their work.
Petridish.org is the largest crowdfunding website devoted entirely to science and research funding.Researchers post materials about a project they want to launch, and contributors on our site can donate to those projects in exchange for rewards and other tokens of appreciation.Typically, researchers set a goal and a deadline by which they hope to raise the money. If they reach the goal by the deadline, then the project is successfully funded. If they don’t reach the goal, no money changes hands.Historically, if you had to assess the quality of a study without having the luxury of reading it, you would probably ask two questions: If published, how prestigious is the journal?While far from perfect, these questions give a general sense of the quality of a piece of research. Something that was published in Nature is likely of higher quality than something published in a small society journal and both of these papers are likely to be of higher quality than a paper that has been rejected from multiple journals and now sits unpublished in a desk drawer.This quick and dirty assessment of paper quality worked for a long time, since there were a fairly limited number of journals where you could publish research on any given topic. If peer reviewers deemed your work to be of high enough quality and/or impact, then it was accepted for publication. If not, it went unpublished. That served as a simple, albeit crude, way to assess the quality of a study or experiment. If no one was willing to publish your paper, then it must not be of very high qualityTaken a step further, these questions can also be used to assess the quality of a researcher. Are you publishing many peer-reviewed papers? Are they in top journals? If the answer to either of those questions is no, then the implication would be that your research was of lower quality than someone who answered yes.There are problems with this line of reasoning (among several obvious problems: not all papers that get rejected are low quality, and not all papers that sneak through the peer review process are high quality), but in general I would say that many people were happy with the system, since it was simple and reasonably effective at keeping movement system.
2. What gave you the idea for starting Petridish.org? 
Before starting Petridish.org, I worked at a large venture capital firm and became interested in the power of the internet to transform the way things were funded. One website, kickstarter had become very successful in raising money for art and creative projects. I wanted to bring that power to science funding, which is an interest area of mine and is an area that desperately needs new models for funding.There are a few things that make us different. First, we’ve focused on building a high quality, fun webexperience for contributors. Aside from our focus on design, we hand select only the most interesting and impactful projects to feature on our site, including those with great videos, pictures and rewards. Many of the existing sites focus exclusively on the experience for the scientist raising money– we cater to both sides of the marketplace.Second, we only do “all or nothing” funding. We do this because it protects the scientist from having to do a project without sufficient funding and it protects contributors who wouldn’t want to donate to a project that doesn’t have enough funding to go through. It also encourages people to really pull together to promote a project, since a project won’t happen without enlisting the support of others as well.A few weeks ago there were a number of interesting posts floating around the web discussing the appropriateness of science blogging as a form of self-promotion (see this post by Scicurious for an excellent backgrounder) . This is an issue that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about – communicating with people about our own research wasn’t the only reason that Peter and I got into blogging, but it was a very big part of it. And it’s one of the main reasons why I advocate for researchers to get involved in social media.Out of curiosity I put up a poll asking people whether they felt it was ok for a person to blog about their own research, and today I thought I would share those results (sorry for the longer than expected delay getting them posted).Academic self-promotion is good. Knowing and meeting the right people, staying in touch and making sure they remember who you are. Academic self-promotion is in fact more than good, it’s essential. The sad reality of biomedical science as I know it is that no one will fund your work if they don’t have a clue who you are. By “you”, I don’t mean you personally (though that certainly helps), but who you have trained with, who THAT person trained with, who’s in your department, and what you all have done. Grant people like to call this “evidence of past productivity”, and “training environment”, but what it really means is whether or not you’ve published, and who do you work with that they’ve heard of. There’s a reason we refer to papers as “Smith et al, 2011″, and not by their titles, because by referring to that person we are referring to their body of work, their history, and their expertise.This means you have to do a lot of self-promotion within academia. We call this “networking”, “presenting at conferences”, “chatting up the seminar speaker at lunch”, and in extreme cases “brown nosing”. This is the “good” kind of self-promotion, the kind that we get a lot of lectures about.I’ve always been surprised by the view that blogging about your own work is somehow not Kosher (keeping in mind that I’m a bit biased since this was explicitly one of the reasons why Peter and I began blogging in the first place, and our field of study lends itself to knowledge translation activities). If it’s ok to do a plenary session or media interview or editorial/review paper explaining how your work fits into the larger context, I don’t see why it’s off-side to post similar things on a blog. Trashing another research group at a conference or in a Letter to the Editor would have at least as large an impact on the field as doing so on a blog, no?I don’t disagree that this can potentially lead to changes in a paper’s citation count or its impact on the field, but is that by default a bad thing? Is it better for a good paper to languish uncited because it’s in a journal no one reads, or is it better for people to find out about that paper on your blog? If a person were lying about their own research that’s one thing, but if I you are telling people accurate information about your own work as well as other work in your field of research, I don’t see why this should be a problem. And as Sci points out, if you start playing up your work as something it’s not, that is going to bite you in the butt pretty quickly.The one qualification that I would add is that if you are writing about your own work, I think it’s critical that you let people know it’s your own. Trashing your competitors and praising your own work, without letting your readers know about your conflict of interest, would be absolutely inappropriate. But if you are transparent about your position and potential bias, then I think it’s a completely legitimate form of scientific communication.
No comments:
Post a Comment