Challenging, cajoling and rewarding the community for their

contributions to online chemistry

Antony Williams, Valery Tkachenko, Alexey Pshenichnov, Will Russell, Jack Rumble and David Leeming

ACS New Orleans April 2013

The Web 2.0 World of Contribution

A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community

Web 2.0 is actually OLD!!!

• We have been contributing to the web for a along time already – but how much in chemistry?

• A few blogs, an increasing amount of tweeting but what about data sharing in chemistry?

Contributions in Chemistry

• A small number of high profile social media aware and engaging chemists

• Some WONDERFUL content on Wikipedia…• Some great blogs but so few really…• So what can we do to encourage participation?

“The Measures of a Scientist are Changing”

Scientists are “Quantified”

• You are already being quantified• Your stats are gathered and analyzed• Employers can find them, tenure will depend

on them, and these already happen without your participation

• Scientists Impact Factors, H-index and many other variants.

Ratings were “available”…now its online

You are Being Quantified…

ResearchGate

The Alt-Metrics Manifesto

• http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

AltMetrics via Plum Analytics

Usage, Citations, Social Media, Etc

Detailed Usage Statistics

• Persistent unique digital identifier • Integrates to workflows such as manuscript

and grant submission• Supports automated linkages with your

professional activities

Enabled by

Your Profile as a Scientist

• If you are an active scientist – i.e. already published, active researcher, generator of data, early, mid- or late career there is lots to do!

• If you are a junior scientist the benefits of investing time now will provide a strong foundation for your future!

• So what do I do??

Places to “Publish” for Profile

• Blogs – easy to setup, generally free, part of the portfolio of contribution

• Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, etc.• Contributions to Wikipedia and other wikis • A myriad of chemistry communities• Publish chemicals, syntheses and data• AND be rewarded and recognized via AltMetrics

Tweets are “publications”

Presentations

Presentations, Videos, Report, Pre-publications

YouTube/Vimeo/SciVee

• Presentations are easy to turn into movies and publish to these services

• Literally “gives you a voice”

Data as a Publication

With Us…Data to ChemSpider

• 28.5 million chemicals and growing daily• Community contribution

– Deposit structures, property data, spectral data– Collections of data– Associated directly with the depositor– Annotations and curations all logged to user

Write about Syntheses

ChemSpider SyntheticPages

Submission Process• Simple template-based submission process• Submissions reviewed by editorial board. • Online Peer Review process• Crowdsourced expansion?

– A few regular dedicated authors only – Online peer review and feedback small but useful

Crowdsourcing – does it work?

• Just over 200 people EVER have deposited or curated data

• ChemSpider SyntheticPages small group of authors

• Database hosts make the largest contributions• ChemSpider staff tend to do the most curation

Contributions

Curations

• 2009 – 8255 curations by 43 people• 2010 – 10014 curations by 66 people • 2011 – 16025 curations by 116 people• 2012 – 13127 curations by 74 people

Depositors

• 2009 91 unique depositors• 2010 120 unique depositors• 2011 99 unique depositors• 2012 120 unique depositors

• “The crowd is small – very small”

Where do we need “crowds”?

• The ChemSpider backfile – 28.5 million chemicals• DERA- Digitally Enhancing the RSC Archive

– Chemical name conversions– Reaction validation– Figure extraction and conversion

• ChemSpider Reactions • Optical Structure Recognition algorithm testing• Reviewing incoming data

ChemSpider

ChemSpider Reactions Comments

Structure Recognition Validation

Spectral Conversion

Digitized Spectrum

Comparison of Spectra

How will it improve?

Participation, contributionWITH

Rewards and RECOGNITION

Rewards and Recognition

• The badgesonomy culture of recognition is growing.

• Badges are commonplace– FourSquare – Klout

Rewards and Recognition

• Rewards and Recognition starting with CSSP then expands to other platforms

• Including paths to expose such recognition on AltMetrics platforms

Challenger

• Integrated commenting, curating and validation platform across ALL eScience and publishing platforms

• All integrated to a central RSC profile and feeding the AltMetrics tools

Where we are now…

Future Recognition onData

IC50 Measurements for 62 substituted benzoxazolesChemSpider Data Repository: DOI: 10.1356/CSID784.4

Future Recognition on Plum Analytics?

ChemSpider

Twitter Contribution #RealTimeChem 2013

Twitter-based community project designed to encourage chemists to:

– actively engage with one another online

– by sharing what they are working on

– at any given time

#RealTimeChem Already Active

And Gone Mobile…

#RealTimeChem Awards

Acknowledgments

• RSC eScience team• David Sharpe for passion re. R&R• William Brouwer – Penn State• All of those tools and systems

Thank you

Email: williamsa@rsc.org Twitter: ChemConnectorPersonal Blog: www.chemconnector.com SLIDES: www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams