During our chat (which came about via the gentlemanly assistance of Walter Jessen) Sol mentioned that his brother Abe Lederman of Deep Web Technologies was working in conjunction with the Office of Scientific & Technical Information (OSTI) of the U. S. Department of Energy, Microsoft Research and others on what has recently launched as Multilingual WorldWideScience, which Abe discusses here.

Now I care deeply about the Open Science, Open Access and Open Data movements and I have been a bit puzzled by the low profile of search in much of the discussion of those movements. As interest grows among funders of medical research (note the presence of representatives of disease advocacy groups, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and government officials among the presenters of the upcoming Open Science Summit 2010) in the growth of Open Science and given that they might start making their support of researchers conditional on the agreement of grantees to conduct their research according to the tenets of Open Science whenever possible or at the least to agree upfront to deposit all of their results in PubMed Central or other public repositories there is going to be an explosion in the amount of data and medical literature that is going to have to be searched.

And given that the Obama administration is very strongly in favor of rendering as much of the vast store of government data and results of government-financed research as accessible to the general public and scientific community as possible (see the PDFs of much of this discussion of earlier this year here) search is going to become ever more crucial—and not just with American material. As China and countries such as Brazil and Turkey take off economically their scientific contributions will grow as well. And much of that wealth of knowledge is not in English.

That is why I found the slide show Multilingual WorldWideScience: Accelerating Discovery through Multilingual Translations by the director of  OSTI, Walter L. Warnick, surprisingly moving, inspiring and not at all dry.

As someone who grew up in a family that housed students who had left home and family in China, Japan, Iran, Korea and other countries to study engineering, chemistry, physics, biochemistry and so on at Oregon State University here in my hometown of Corvallis, Oregon I know what brilliant people there are in many countries who have so much to offer and what a boon it will be that the work of researchers worldwide will become useable to each of them and benefit the rest of us.

Dr. Warnick makes some simple but important points.

For example, he says in his slideshow,

Corollary 1:  Scientific discovery can be accelerated by accelerating access to worldwide scientific information.

The case for WorldWideScience.org.

Corollary 2:  Multilingual translations of science will further accelerate scientific discovery.

The case for Multilingual WorldWideScience.org

I have recently lost a friend to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and I would often sadly reflect as I bicycled home from her house about the glacial pace of progress on research on that disease and others like it. That is why I find Dr. Warnick’s enthusiasm and practical accomplishments so very admirable and the best possible case for paying one’s taxes with a minimal amount of grumbling. He is putting federal funds to exemplary use.

Dr. Warnick talks of “The “Accelerating” Power of WorldWideScience.org” and goes on to discuss problems that are now being addressed:

Overcoming the researcher’s practical limitations:

Not knowing “what’s out there.” (examples:  Korean medical journals, Australian Antarctic data, South African scientific research database)

Inadequate time to search scientific databases one by one. (examples:  UK PubMed Central, Ginsparg’s arXiv.org)

Inability to sort compiled results by relevance.

By filling these gaps, WorldWideScience.org has accelerated access to scientific information.

He adds,

To further accelerate access to science, multilingual translations are needed in both directions

Translation of English content for non-English speakers and translation of non-English content for English speakers

He concludes, “With the launch of Multilingual WorldWideScience.org, we are . . .

Opening vast reservoirs of heretofore under-utilized scientific knowledge

Providing equal access to science for anyone on the Internet

Promoting scientific collaboration, participation, and transparency

. . . and accelerating scientific discovery!”

Not a bad day’s work!

Kudos to all involved in Multilingual WorldWideScience. This is a real model of government-industry and international cooperation and a major contribution to the advancement of science and the betterment of the human condition. Sorry for getting so misty-eyed, but this really is a stupendous achievement.

As the many worlds of Open Science, Open Access, Open Research and Research 2.0 (check out the  superb slideshow Virtual Research Networks: Towards Research 2.0 for insights into how much of this data is being generated) develop Multilingual WorldWideScience will be there to make all of this activity quite literally intelligible to anyone with an Internet connection.

This is all quite fascinating for those interested in how publishers are faring in a rapidly changing online world in which both the public and policymakers are scrutinizing the existing cozy, rigid realm of sci/tech and medical publishing and not liking what they see.

I have written about DeepDyve’s innovative “Research. Rent. Read.” model before and have since then chatted on the phone with DeepDyve’s CEO, William Park. I had been planning to write about DeepDyve’s interesting alliance with CiteULike but wanted to first attend ScienceOnline2010 because I knew that there was to be a session there called, “Online Reference Managers”
and that one of the firms to be discussed at it was to be CiteULike.

And here I am going to digress into matters of nomenclature. CiteULike itself uses the wording, “free service for managing and discovering scholarly references” and “scholarly bookmarking services,” whereas at ScienceOnline2010 we saw the wording, “Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information.”

Soooo, take your pick. I think I am going to stick with social bookmarking as that seems the most common term, and it is easier for me to type the word “social” than the word “scholarly.”

In any case, I am glad that I attended that session at ScienceOnline (and if I were a vendor or startup that had anything to do with software in the sciences I would send a huge contingent to next year’s conference, as there will be many opportunities there to get a feel for products that the online science community needs) because it gave me a better handle on social bookmarking in the sciences. Oh, rats—maybe I should have stuck with the term scholarly bookmarking. So many words for the same thing.

I am actually somewhat grateful for my sloth since then and for not having written about the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance (which is not a partnership per se, as far as I can tell) because there have been several developments at DeepDyve in the interval that I can now discuss in this one post, having finally roused myself to a state of modest activity.

Let us first examine what makes the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance interesting and what might enable the two firms to actually make some money from it.

Here are the pros at this stage as I see them.

First of all, Mr. Park has long argued that there is a substantial pool of researchers (and I would argue a vast unrecognized group of laypeople who have a driving interest in a scientific subject whether as a hobby or because they are activists on an environmental issue, say, or are afflicted by or love someone with a dire illness) who have need of scholarly articles but who have no access to resource-rich libraries and so have to either pay whopping sums (say $35 a pop for maybe seven pages of text), prevail on the good will of those who do have access to such resources (and those so beseeched may feel uneasy about complying with such supplications given how confusing and occasionally draconian copyright rules are on sharing scholarly articles) or do without the information.

DeepDyve’s pitch to publishers is that this is a huge market and that sci/tech publishers (many of which are professional societies that make money from their publishing operations and which have simply ignored non-members or disdained them as dilettantes or ignoramuses unworthy of attention) are better off trying to entice them by risking peeks at articles online for 99 cents in the hopes that the lurker will so like what he sees via his non-reproducible, non-downloadable peek that he will pony up for the actual PDF or otherwise downloadable version.

The trick for both CiteULike and DeepDyve is to persuade the publishers that they are better off trying the 99 cent peek gambit than to remain aloof from this group and continue their present ways of making money: squeezing libraries until the pips squeak (not a sustainable strategy given cost pressures in academia at even the richest of institutions, let alone cash-strapped ones), charging ever more for personal subscriptions, and assuming that the general public is willing to continue forking over $20-45 for articles when they are becoming aware of the Open Access movement. This awareness and concomitant disgruntlement are fueling the drive for public access to taxpayer-funded research. In the current anti-corporate, tar and feather the price gougers public mood DeepDyve could actually provide some cover and heretofore untapped revenue streams for the publishers willing to partner with DeepDyve (and DeepDyve is making major strides there—more on that below).

Let us stick with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance for the moment. Another plus for the publishers that they should take note of is its potential as a way of advertising the existence of its offerings to educated (who also tend to be affluent ones) readers.

For instance, if you do a search in CiteULike you often will come up with journals you had not heard of before. Now, if I could take a series of 99-cent peeks at various articles in a periodical without even getting up my from desk (as opposed to, say, emailing asking for a free sample copy which I may or may not be granted and which may take weeks to arrive in hard copy and which may be several years old and thus not good advertising of the value of the journal) I might be impressed enough to subscribe to the journal itself or simply go ahead and purchase the full text of several articles.

The risk for the publishers, of course, is that I will do nothing but peek, get the gist and never do much more than that. But at least they would have gotten maybe $5 out of me that day, which is better than nothing.

Another plus for the publishers of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is that as more and more libraries cut back on journal subscriptions even researchers that are affiliated with universities will find that they can’t get what they need from their own institutions and may start using the 99-cent peek and either download the full article (a win for the publisher) or try to get the full article via their library’s interlibrary loan service (which is still a win for the publisher in that some interest has been generated in the journal, which means some library somewhere will continue subscribing to it).

A minus for the publisher of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is the rather inert state of scholarly bookmarking services (and spam problems at Connotea, for instance), so whether they would truly get much business from hooking up with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is another question. (For instance, I just tried out CiteULike again for really the first major go at it since I set up my account way back in 2005—but then I am not a heavy duty scholar).

Likewise, for CiteULike the value of the relationship with DeepDyve can be realized only if DeepDyve can demonstrate that it has many big-name publishers on board.

For example, I tried a search just now in CiteULike on my usual search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Because DeepDyve has no relationships with publishers that feature the huge number of journals in the neurological sciences that, say Springer (which, as the sponsor of CiteULike, you would think would come on board with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance) or Elsevier do, I saw not a single icon for the 99-cent peek.

But the fact that I could not see the icon for my search is really an argument for the value of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance to publishers. I mean here I was, doing a search. My debit card is in the room. I could easily have ordered several articles if I had had immediate access to a peek and possibly sizable sums of money could have been extracted from me just now.

Think about that scenario, publishers. Do you really want me to have to try to find your stuff in Google or hope that I know enough to use PubMed and get to your toll access sites from there and then hope that I will simply hand over $35 or so without a peek or peep?

And DeepDyve is starting to forge a pretty impressive roster of blue ribbon publishers among its offerings and is approaching critical mass in terms of raising the comfort level among prestige publishers with its “Research. Rent. Read.” model. It now has relationships with major scholarly publishers such as the MIT Press, and the University of California Press, and with professional societies like the American Institute of Physics, the Radiological Society of North America, and the Association for Computing Machinery. Not bad.

I am quite puzzled, actually, as to why this quite interesting company is not getting the attention it merits in the library and scholarly publishing blogosphere. Perhaps librarians aren’t writing about it because they can usually, via professional networks and personal relationships, get their patrons what they need. Open Access people are not writing about it because they are philosophically opposed to cash changing hands when it comes to research information.

But let’s talk ugly truths here. We are not in a world where everyone has access to library resources galore. And not everything is Open Access yet. There are large numbers of people who need scholarly information and should have an affordable option for getting it and publishers should be aware that there are ways to make some money is some instances rather than none in many and that 99-cent peeks can lead to years of individual subscriptions.

William Park is an endlessly creative thinker. DeepDyve started off a nice little search engine. That in itself was interesting and worthwhile. He is now creating new models for the entire sci/tech publishing industry and making what had been a rather tired Web tool (social bookmarking) interesting again. Gotta hand it to the guy–there are second acts in American life.

But I would like to introduce you to the wider health technology and Open Science communities given your ability to recognize important technologies, tools and trends in the area of scientific and scholarly communication and your skill in explaining their use and recognizing their potential for many tasks. You are an educator and explicator supreme.

I envision as readers of this interview not only medical librarians and sci/tech librarians but anyone in the healthcare industry who needs information from time to time—and that is basically everyone in healthcare. Therefore, readers of this interview might include physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, healthcare administrators, healthcare informaticians, those in the fields of biomedical/clinical research, health information management and so on.

Moreover, I think that much of what you have to say will be of interest to the increasing numbers of empowered patients, known as e-Patients, most notably exemplified by people like e-Patient Dave and by readers of the site e-patients.net, which is run by the Society for Participatory Medicine.

E-Patients are a new breed of patients. They are sophisticated, determined seekers of healthcare information and medical librarians are going to encounter more and more of them and you are just the man to help those two groups get to know each other.

Finally, I would like to introduce you to those interested in the area of Open Science and scholarly communication in general. People like Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Antony Williams, John Wilbanks, and Bora Zivkovic are changing the very nature of how science is done and how research results are disseminated and I would like to get your views on how what they doing is going to affect us in the field of healthcare farther down the pipeline. Could you introduce yourself as if you were addressing this wide audience?

Hi, my name is Dean Giustini; I am a Canadian academic health sciences librarian and blogger living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. I am a biomedical librarian at University of British Columbia’s main teaching hospital in a new building called the Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre. My main responsibilities are to provide library, research and instructional support to UBC faculty and students at Vancouver General Hospital; I am also responsible for managing the onsite staff and collections of monographs and journals that support the academic and clinical activities onsite. Academically, I teach two courses at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies; 1) a new course on social media and 2) a traditional course on health librarianship.

My main extracurricular interests are related to web technologies in medicine. I enjoy providing information services to hospital personnel and teaching information literacy skills to medical students, but I enjoy collaborating with physicians using social media and Web 2.0 applications. I am a traditionalist librarian in my views but try to find the potential in digital interaction and web technologies in my work as well.

I first became aware of you around 2004-2005 when I was new to the field of medical librarianship and learning about how the Web was affecting how medical people acquire information. You were one of the first to address this topic in a very public and influential way with your 2006 article in the British Medical Journal, “How Web 2.0 is Changing Medicine.” Could you please tell us a little about what led to the publication of that piece, your reaction to the reactions to it and what has surprised or disappointed you vis-à-vis developments in the years since it was published?

That’s an interesting question. First of all, I was quite amazed by the interest that the BMJ web 2.0 editorial got – and how how often it is cited. It is an opinion piece not research. I had no idea it would be important when I wrote it. It was easy to write because I believed that social media would be important for all of us. And I could see how digital interaction using social media would be important to collaborative science. In retrospect, I can see why web 2.0 was controversial; even now biomedical librarians are debating the importance of web 2.0. The field of medicine and science has moved on from the squabbles around what ‘web 2.0’ means and whether it exists but perhaps the phrase ‘social media’ is more appropriate than the 2.0 suffix in discussing the technologies of the era.

In any case, I keep waiting for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to create a MeSH for web 2.0. Since the BMJ editorial, Eysenbach has defined medicine 2.0 and the 2.0 suffix is used for everything including for all kinds of marketing purposes. The most important aspect of web 2.0 is that the tools help us to build networks and take advantage of “Metcalfe’s Law” – the network effect – for collaboration. Although physicians are building silos around their networks in private spaces patients are very openly sharing information about themselves. I doubt there is much digital interaction between the two groups yet; I only know what physicians and patients tell me that they are starting to enjoy using the tools. I am not sure that the changes we are seeing in how patients and doctors communicate online comes close to what we see when patients interact with each other. It’ll never be equivalent because doctors operate within very different parameters of practice.

In that article you said, “For me, the promise of open access in Web 2.0—freed of publishing barriers and multinational interests—is especially compelling.” Where are we now in that respect?

When I wrote that line about the synergy between web 2.0 and open access I was referring to the publishing potential of social media and OA journals. Much of this potential remains unrealized. I have been disappointed by the poor performance of wikis versus the surprising growth of open access. Since the editorial, I got involved in Open Medicine – one of Canada’s open access journals. We are making progress and NLM accepted us recently for Medline (PubMedCentral) indexing. It’s been a long, arduous path, but we did it in two years.

You said in that piece, “The rise of wikis as a publishing medium—especially Wikipedia—holds some unexamined pearls for the advancement of medicine. The notion of a medical wikipedia—freely accessible and continually updated by doctors—is worthy of further exploration.” What do you think, then, of the Medpedia Project, other players such as Google’s Knol, and the fact that Wikipedia is experiencing an exodus of editors.

I am happy with the development of HLWIKI Canada (formerly the UBC Health Library wiki). But as a team of writers and health librarians, we are only beginning to use the wiki as a collaborative space and platform. One of the problems is that I write most entries. I continue to believe that medical/physician and librarian-moderated wikis can play a role in biomedical publishing but some wikis have simply not caught on – and no where near what we have seen with Wikipedia. I’m not sure what the reasons are, but PageRank in Google has helped Wikipedia move up to the top of search results. These factors have an impact on whether your wiki will be seen and used.

Occasionally, I check out what is happening at Google’s Knol. I read an article recently and compared it with Medpedia. Despite the support Medpedia has, I am not sure how it is doing. When I go to the site I am left with a feeling of ‘so what’ – can’t we do better? AskDrWiki and Ganfyd are good wikis but again they are not very well-known. I worry that the ‘free’ remix culture espoused by Chris Anderson and Lawrence Lessig has hit a wall of some kind and that people are tired of contributing with no recognition. Perhaps this is Wikipedia’s problem too. At some point, folks bail out and try something else.

Do you see wikis as less useful for medicine than was first thought or are there are wikis run by those in certain medical specialties that are thriving and that it is only the general interest ones that seem to be hitting a wall? How is the Open Medicine wiki project going, for instance, which you wrote about in the post “Can Wikis be Used as a Publishing Platform in Medicine?”

The Open Medicine wiki has suffered from the same fate as the wikis we’ve mentioned above. The main issue is that maintaining a wiki is a lot of work and you need an army of writers, editors and volunteers. The wiki is a labour of love –I do a lot of promotion of it whenever I can. I cannot contribute to the Open Medicine wiki because I am not a physician. I think that the OM wiki is worth a try, but I wonder about its staying power. I often have trouble getting docs to use PubMed properly, so how can I convince them to contribute to building a wiki? It’s uncertain.

What do you see as the future of a user-generated content in medicine in general, whether by patients in such online communities as PatientsLikeMe or by medical people for each other in gated communities such as Sermo or by the quite interesting attempt to enlist both practitioners and patients in the form of audiences and contributors in the Journal of Participatory Medicine.

User-generated content where social tools are used in medicine will continue to evolve in ‘specialized niche areas.’ I worry about these niches because they engender ‘bias.’ Typically, we friend people we agree with and ‘block’ those we don’t agree with; this prevents disagreement. You mention the consumer health social space PatientsLikeMe and the physician social networking site Sermo – generally viewed as two successful examples of social media. The last report I heard, AMA had severed its relationship with Sermo because it did not have enough say about the direction of Sermo. When it started, Sermo was an ‘adverse reporting’ system and it morphed into a social networking site. The lesson is that medicine is still monolithic and apt to change in time. The veil of secrecy cannot be removed overnight; patriarchy will change over time. The ‘wedge’ or tipping point for social media will probably be in the area of online consultations and finding ways to compensate doctors for their time.

Getting back to the matter of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Participatory Medicine, could you comment on one of the most interesting articles in it, “In Search of an Optimal Peer Review System?”

What, for instance, is your reaction to that article given that it is by Richard Smith, someone closely associated with the British Medical Journal, the very periodical that published your own article on the Web and medicine? What do you think of Smith’s comments, for instance, “I think that it would make much more sense simply to publish the paper — on a university website or in an electronic journal with a low threshold — with my comments and those of the other reviewer and let the world decide what it thinks. That is anyway what happens in that many peer-reviewed papers disappear without trace after publication, some are torn to pieces, and a few flourish and are absorbed into the body of science.” And, “Web 2.0, the social web, may hold the key to the future of peer review. Peer review will become the job of the many rather than the few, and we know that the many can solve problems better than the few…”

I enjoy Richard Smith’s ideas and thinking about web 2.0. He is on the Editorial Board of Open Medicine. His views are very progressive. He is trying to make his profession more transparent and accountable to patients. When a high profile person discusses peer review and publishing papers on accessible websites for all to see and critique –I listen. There is a downside to open peer review – poor bibliographic control. What Smith may or may not know is that researchers publishing openly on the web would create chaos – how would we find anything? How would studies be comprehensively indexed? This is a big problem of the information age. When you take advantage of anytime, anywhere publishing — you also fragment the medical bibliography and make it more difficult to organize.

And on a related topic, do you see the recent moves by Harvard and MIT to mandate Open Access policies as momentous vis-à-vis mounting a genuine challenge to the power of the big publishing houses and creating a workable model of Open Access publishing that other universities could follow, thereby creating a world in which scholarly publishing and clinical research could indeed be freed of the fetters of the tyranny of antiquated publishing practices that hinder the advancement of science and impede efforts to help patients farther down the line? Or are the publishers simply too powerful and the forces of tradition vis-à-vis peer review, and tenure and promotion practices simply too entrenched for radical change? Are the Harvard and MIT policies the tipping point for an Open Access world or noble but ultimately fruitless endeavors? Are they harbingers of real change that will affect the day-day-day lives of clinical researchers and, therefore, farther down the line, medical providers and medical librarians?

In an ideal world “Why can’t we all get along”? Universities, multinational publishers and institutional repositories such as PubMedCentral should be working together and building partnerships. I am surprised a public-private hybrid model has not emerged. Academic librarians should take the lead and offer to host journals using open journal systems (OJS). For unprofitable journals, or those with small readerships, publishers should think about good corporate citizenship and help struggling society and university publishers to publish journals.

Now, let’s talk techno tools. The name of your blog, for instance, is The Search Principle blog and on Twitter you categorize yourself as a “bio-medical librarian, renegade, techno-enthusiast.” Let’s parse that a bit. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? What, for example, is a bio-medical librarian versus a plain old medical librarian? A renegade in what respect?

I am all three: a health librarian, a medical librarian and a biomedical librarian. I answer to all. I wrote that on Twitter and on my blog because I had to come up with something. I’m not too much of a renegade, but I admit I won’t tolerate inequities and I stand up for others who cannot stand up for themselves. Perhaps this is what I am trying to do in my profession: stand up for our field, for excellence and high standards.

And as to being a techno-enthusiast, what are your top five favorite Web or search tools and what should we look for techno-wise in the coming year for medical librarians and vis-à-vis Web users in healthcare generally?

Keep in mind that I have to answer your questions from my perspective as a Canadian. Finding as much Canadian content as I can – medical evidence, statistics and local consumer health information — is central in my work. The websites or search tools that I cannot do without are: 1) The BC Health Guide 2) Public Health Agency of Canada 3) Health Canada 4) The Cochrane Library and 5) Medline OR PubMed. I also think that WorldCat is important as are Bing and Google Scholar (and all three have Canadian content).

Do you regard Wolfram|Alpha as a flash in the pan or as something truly promising? What do you think of Rupert Murdoch’s pushback vis-à-vis Google? Dumb move on his part? Is Google the default and any moves to try to shift Web users to Bing doomed from the get-go?

Wolfram Alpha has a lot of promise, but it may in fact be a ‘flash in the pan.’ For laypeople, and non-scientists, it’s not easy to use. We want it to behave like our print tools like the Merck Index and the CRC Handbook to behave – with intelligence and intuition. The only problem is that searchers do not know how to extract the information from it or how to form answerable questions.

As to Murdoch and his rejection or challenge to Google, I think it’s fine. Google needs competition. The more players we have in search the better. I don’t think Bing is doomed and don’t think it will be easy to dethrone Google. Ten or eleven years ago, no one thought Yahoo could be unseated as the most important search tool. The whole area of web searching continues to get attention for the money – but it too will stop flowing if the tools do not produce usable results or become cumbersome to use.

Getting back to Twitter, what are your favorite tools in it, how has its advent changed your work practices, whom has it connected you with that you had not known of before and how do you see it being used effectively by librarians, clinical researchers and front-line clinicians? Can you give us specific real-world instances of its use in clinical settings?

We need a whole conference to discuss Twitter properly. I will say that it has evolved since it was first developed – because we, the users, have seen its potential applications. Twitter suits me (and my needs) on a number of different levels: first, I’m a snoop so Twitter satisfies my need to listen to other people and to access information and gossip in real-time. Second, I enjoy hearing about other people’s working lives, projects and thoughts on world events. Finally, I enjoy myself more when I have information sent to me. Danah Boyd speaks eloquently on her blog about how she was intimidated by backchannels while she spoke at a conference. But Twitter is useful to all kinds of clinical people; I hear some psychologists use it to remind patients to take their medication. For anyone who needs to send tweets in the future, you can use a range of clients to send your ‘network of contacts’ messages at selected intervals.

Whom do you regard as the best tweeters in medicine and librarianship? Any additions to your list here?

I will definitely be adding to this list in 2010. Stay tuned.

Do you see Twitter as eclipsing blogs per se or do you find that Twitter drives traffic to blogs? Do you foresee the RSS button on blogs and Web sites being replaced by Twitter buttons? Or is RSS the perfect tool for leveraging the power of Twitter? Who are your favorite bloggers?

All of the tools you mention such as blogs and RSS feeds are affected by other social media. But I don’t see any tool that you have mentioned being eclipsed or replaced. Blogs are central to our culture now. Twitter has changed some of our behaviours and writing less than 15 words or 140 characters; it too is part of our culture. I like Twitter because there is power in concision and regular posts to your network. All of this is a part of defining your influence in the spaces of web 2.0. But none of that will stop me from blogging which is integral in my work.

You provide here a very useful overview of social media tools and I was interested in this comment, “RSS feeds can potentially replace traditional email lists, reducing email overload.” Have you indeed noticed that some email lists are disappearing or are people simply using tools such as Feed My Inbox
to use RSS a way to create email alerts? Are RSS readers really gaining traction among the general public or are they passé as far as the masses are concerned and are they falling out of favor even with the info-minded cognoscenti?

The level of general interest in RSS feeds and aggregating tools like Bloglines and iGoogle has been disappointing. There are physicians and other health professionals who do not know what “RSS” means or why it might be useful. The dominant form of communication is still e-mail. I maintain accounts on a number of aggregators and have discovered new aggregators such as Netvibes and Ning. The latter is a tool that allows you to create your own network – and it is very easy to use. But its adoption in medicine is minimal.

Thank you for your time, Dean.

I came to learn of you as I have been trying, as the saying goes, to “wrap my head around” the concepts of Open Science, Open Notebook Science and what seems to be a genuine revolution in scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific information. I have come in the past year or so to learn that there is a core group of people in the vanguard of this movement including Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Andrew Lang, Michael Nielsen and you.

Open Science seems to me to be a genuinely transformative movement in not only science but in the information sciences and should be of interest to anyone with an interest in scientific research, scientific publishing, academia, scholarly communication, search engines, the relationship of new technologies to mainstream scientific societies, technological innovation, the Semantic Web, big data, social networking in the sciences, new tools for scientific and scholarly collaboration and so on. And throw in the fact that you have managed to create something important with very little (if any) grant funding that caught the attention of and was acquired by the prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry.

We actually did it without any grant funding. ChemSpider was originally started as a hobby project so looking for grant-funding to fund a hobby project per se wouldn’t have been a good basis for any agency to contribute. Can you imagine that exchange with the NSF… “It’s something we’re interested in doing for the benefit of the community so would you mind kicking in a few dollars to cover the costs at least?” A discussion destined for failure. Even much later when we were listed on grant applications with collaborators we unfortunately didn’t get any funding. We did, however, have a number of companies step forward and sponsor the site because we were doing something of value for them, especially when we provided access to the data via a series of web services. Specifically Waters, Thermo, Agilent and Bruker all contributed and we thank them for that. It helped pay for the hardware!

Thus, we have in you we have the story of a basic scientist who also succeeded as a Web entrepreneur on the strength of a way cool tool and the respect you garnered as a scientist and innovator.

Thanks for the kudos. While I am a scientist I think my role over the past decade has been “Idea Guy” and “Connector,” connector being the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the word (The Tipping Point). I know a lot of very able people who are willing to move from the talking stage of doing something to actually getting it done. I’m very opinionated regarding when there is enough talking and thinking about doing something and it’s time to get things done. As I like to say “Try to feed the dog and the dog dies. If you ACTUALLY feed the dog he’ll be fine….but if you only TRY he won’t be.” Over the years I’ve developed a fairly good batting average in terms of starting a project, iterating, revisiting progress, stopping if necessary and redirecting as necessary. It’s my preferred way of working. It’s much easier to run a project this way outside of a structured organization, of course.

I envision as readers of this article all those who are, like me, trying to get a grasp of who’s who in Open Science, anyone who cares about the future of science (and that really should include every human being given the importance science plays a role in practically every breath we take, how long we live and like matters), plus medical, scientific and academic librarians, science educators at all levels, information scientists, computer science students with start-up stars in their eyes, those who love chemistry, those who need to keep up on key developments in the world of search and those who want to gain a better understanding of rather arcane terms such as “the Semantic Web.”

I agree with you…Science touches us all. I was listening today to President Obama commenting about how the USA is lagging behind on math and science skills. I have to agree. I’m British by birth and didn’t get to the states until I was in my early 20s but I’ve been here almost a quarter of a century now and I have sensed a change in the interest in science. We do amazing science in this country, just incredible. I get to meet a lot of kids but I can’t think of one who thinks its “cool and interesting” that I am scientist. Maybe it’s because I don’t mix chemicals anymore and don’t make “stuff.” Science isn’t exposed to the public the way it used to be in my opinion. I think there are a lot of people trying to interest students and making sincere efforts, but I am hoping that the new administration will shine more of a spotlight on the issue of lagging math and science skills and DO something to change it.

One of the pleasures of conducting interviews with brilliant people who create pathbreaking tools is that I get the opportunity to grill them on matters of terminology.

In that tradition, I would like to ask you first to give us a very simple explanation of what ChemSpider is and why non-chemists should know about it. For example, I work in the biomedical sciences and for my own interest follow research developments in the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Much of the work on that disease involves the testing of various chemicals on mouse models to see if they have any effect on preventing or curing the disease or slowing its development. Now, I would think that tools that greatly expedite the work of chemists at a very basic level would benefit clinical researchers down the road. Could you please outline for us why average people who are ill or love people who are should care about ChemSpider and the wider world of Open Science? Does chemistry really matter to those of us who aren’t chemists?

I’ll break this into pieces to answer your questions. Firstly, what is ChemSpider? At present it is primarily a large database of chemicals and related data linked out to the original sources of the data. What we’re been working towards is having ChemSpider be a “structure-centric” resource. If you want to find information associated with a chemical structure/compound and you know either its name(s) or its chemical structure then you can search the database and find associated information and data. The data are of various forms and include lists of chemical identifiers, experimental and predicted properties, analytical data, textual descriptions including synthesis procedures and Wikipedia articles, links to related information and data sources.

In terms of “Does chemistry really matter to those of us who aren’t chemists?” that parallels questions such as “Should we care about Mathematics? Who cares about art or literature?”. While there are of course many issues and side effects of chemistry that have been detrimental to the health of the planet “chemists and chemistry” will be at the forefront of healing the harm we have done. Whether the public are conscious of it or not chemistry continues to bring benefits to society in so many ways in the form of drugs, novel materials for a myriad of applications, for green applications such as battery technologies, biodegradable polymers, safer pesticides, fertilizers and so on. These examples are ones that the public would easily recognize. Chemistry is everywhere and it should matter to all of us.

Now let’s move along to questions of terminology. As I have read around on the Web in preparation for this interview, I have seen ChemSpider characterized in various ways. Could you please define for us the terms I have come across in articles about ChemSpider?

Structure Centric Community
Chemical compounds encompass a broad distribution. There are those that have been fully characterized and defined and can be represented in terms of a chemical structure diagram and in our specific case in the form of a “connection table” of atoms and bonds. There are then those chemicals that are materials with specific compositions, for example minerals, or a distributed composition, for example polymers with a distribution of molecular weights and end groups. ChemSpider presently is limited to dealing with “structures” that can be represented with a connection table. The community aspect is twofold: ChemSpider as a resource is provided for the benefit of the community but we also intend for the community to participate in the enhancement of the data quality and content.

Database
ChemSpider sits of a database of diverse data associated with millions of chemical structures. The database itself is Microsoft SQL Server and what we have done is built a data model onto SQL server and populated the database with chemistry-related content.

As you can see, I am trying to figure out when something is a database and when it is a search engine. I work very happily on ScanGrants, but I still can’t figure out if it is a database or a search engine. We just use the wording, “a public service listing of grants and other funding types.” Could you please delineate for us the differences between a search engine and a database and is ChemSpider both depending on what operation the user is engaged in within it? Could you please give examples of what you would consider a database and what you would consider a search engine?

Interesting question. I think of a database as two things – the technology itself that hosts the content (in our case the database in SQL server) and then the data model and the data populated against the data model. Clearly SQL Server itself is unlikely to be of interest to chemists unless it is holding data of interest to them. A search engine is the manner by which people discover content and relationships that is generally, but not always housed within a database. The utility of ChemSpider is not just limited to searching a database as the platform provides access to a number of tools for the user that still have high value and do not involve performing searches or tapping into the existing data content. For example, we have a services page where a user can draw their own structure (or upload it) and predict a series of physicochemical properties for their structure. This does not depend on the structure being in the database as they are real time predictions and not data look-ups.
Examples of various databases would be eBay, Amazon and Wikipedia – they are all sitting on underlying database technologies and the user is interested in the content within. Clearly they all need to be searchable to retrieve information of interest to the user but they are not search engines per se. To me search engines are the classical internet search engines: Google, Bing and I extend it to include Mapquest/Google Earth.

In your very edifying slideshow, “How Internet Resources Are Providing a Collaborative Community for Chemistry” you have an intriguing slide entitled, “Crowd-sourcing chemistry curation.” Could you please talk about crowd-sourcing in chemistry and tell us if there is something unique to chemistry that makes it particularly suitable to crowd-sourcing or are you with ChemSpider and with your colleagues such as Jean-Claude Bradley creating models of collaboration that could be adopted by other branches of science? It does seem to me that Open Science at this point is of interest primarily to chemists and physicists. Will that always be the case or is there activity in fields such as neuroscience and medicine?

In terms of crowd-sourcing in chemistry our hope is that we can garner the support of the community to populate ChemSpider with their own content so that others can benefit from their skills and interests, the so-called “wisdom of the crowd.” However, since there is already so much data and information on ChemSpider we are also hoping that the community will help us validate and curate the data that is on ChemSpider. With over 20 million chemical entities on the database, many associated with dozens of names and properties, it is not difficult to find a simple misspelling, a property without units or a mis-associated spectrum. This amounts to millions of potential errors that cannot be validated algorithmically or robotically and human eyeballs and skills need to be brought to bear.

Jean-Claude Bradley, JC, is at the forefront of Open Notebook Science and is instigating projects that harness the collective skills of students to measure, publish and collectively validate experimental data. In particular this has been brought to bear recently in his Open Solubility Project where a number of individuals are measuring non-aqueous solubility experimental data and sharing the details and results of their measurements via a wiki. The data are then aggregated and served up the community to reuse and repurpose. Since all experimental data are available via links to the original measurement data, true Open Notebook Science, then erroneous results can be questioned, discussed by the community and highlighted for re-measurement or investigation. JC’s work in this particular area is unique but Open Science has been going on for many years in astronomy where large teams openly share datasets and collaborate. If you consider biology this is already going on through the sharing of massive amounts of biological assay screening data through the PubChem platform. In this way certain labs are screening particular compounds and making the data available and other laboratories are accessing the data and using it to investigate potential lead compounds. The same is true of the Toxcast work funded by the environmental protection agency (EPA) where there screening data are being made available to modelers to investigate algorithm development for example. Open Science is all around us today and only continues to grow in parallel with other areas of openness – Open Source and Open Access.

In that same slideshow, you use the rather intriguing term “lost chemistry.” Please elaborate on that.

I originally heard the term “Lost Chemistry” from a gentleman called Dick Wife. Dick has been running a project for a few years to aggregate from chemistry theses synthetic reaction procedures to build a large database of chemical syntheses. For every published chemical reaction there are many more syntheses reporting the experimental conditions, yields and analytical data that never make it outside of the originating laboratory but can be captured into a thesis. Dick has been heading a project called SORD to aggregate these data into a single database and make it available to the community. If you wish to have free access to the resource then you need to be a participating lab and share your data so that it can be populated into SORD. If you wish to access the data but not be an active contributor then you need to pay to access. This helps capture a lot of “Lost Chemistry.” As an NMR spectroscopist I have the same view of the number of spectra measured in a year around the world that never get reported and simply remain confined to hard drives inside an organization. We hope that people will take advantage of the ChemSpider platform to share their data and help prevent the “loss” of chemistry. Imagine how many experiments have been run in labs around the world where the data/description/conclusions are lost in notebooks on a shelf. I am not talking about long-lost information but data generated in the past couple of years where computer capture and data management capabilities could have helped expose the information. This will change. What we need to catalyze the shift is a couple of prominent thought-leaders in our domain to lead the way.

Again in that slideshow, you state, “ChemSpider accepts public depositions, linking to websites, hosting of details etc. Accepts structures, text, spectra, images.” Could you please give examples of each and discuss the challenges of quality control? How do you handle matters of link rot, for example? How has the acquisition of ChemSpider by the RSC helped you in such matters?

I think I’ve outlined earlier the concept of depositing information onto ChemSpider. We do have people submitting their own chemicals to the database now, regular associations of chemicals with publications, association of spectra etc. We have over 2500 spectra at this point. Quality control is rather simple but is hard work for a number of curators. We have different levels of curators and master curators check the curation efforts of members of the community who are depositing and validating data. Spectra are generally checked within a few hours of being deposited, images are generally checked within a few minutes, chemical names are re-checked within a day etc. Simple comments submitted against chemical records are available for everyone to see and the thousands of historical comments made are all viewable. Bottom line, we recheck everything. We have only had a couple of acts of vandalism and it amounted to people posting funny images (for example, the Katie Crowe incident or the Exploding Mouse). I’d estimate well over 95% of the edits and depositions are correct associations. I would say that 99% of the comments raise appropriate awareness to us regarding issues on a particular record. Overall, this is very impressive.

Link rot is an issue but we try to minimize it. For example, we link as many publications as possible via PubMed ID or, preferably, digital object identifier (DOI) and then use those identifiers to pull back the associated information via the appropriate services. We are at risk of broken links with things like blog posts but we tend to consult the blog for creative commons licensing and respect it, often depositing a relevant blog post onto the database and creating the link out to the originating blog post. If the blog changes later and there is no redirect then we at least do have the original source info on the database to load. Link rot is something we are trying to wrap our head around and in terms of data we foresee that application of DOIs for data, as Thieme have done recently for spectral data, could be an important approach.

You also say, “Blogs should be searchable too.” Are blogs (which can be deleted in seconds by the owners) some of the places that lost chemistry can be found? Are Open Notebooks basically blogs? Or are they wikis? Or what?

There are some wonderful blogs out there for synthetic chemists especially. I like the blog of Paul Docherty and “Milkshake” who runs the Org Prep Daily blog. Paul’s blog is generally a detailed analysis of a particular synthesis with links to the original paper. Milkshake posts details of particular syntheses and a lot of experimental detail. We copy the contents of both to ChemSpider and link out to the original posts. I would call this Lost Chemistry….many people had never heard of these blogs until I started pointing to them. I believe we have driven traffic to them. Open Notebooks could be blogs (like OrgPrepDaily) but in the pure sense of the definition from JC Bradley the wiki format with date and time increments displayed throughout the progress of the work is more appropriate. I would say most ONS pages are wiki-based at present.

One new buzzword is “Linked Data.” Is ChemSpider an exemplar of that concept? How does linked data differ from semantic linking?

For the purists I believe that Linked Data is the exposure of data using semantic web layers such as RDF (Resource Description Framework). For myself I believe that ChemSpider is indeed an example of Linked Data even in its present form. We are not yet exposing RDF on ChemSpider but have had it on our plans to do so. There is, (un)fortunately, always something else waiting for our attention.

In your very interesting slideshow, “Navigating the Complex Web of Chemistry Using ChemSpider,” you state on one slide, “Publishers can enhance their articles…” Could you please elaborate on that and tell us what you see as the value of Elsevier’s Article of the Future project?

The publishers are not naïve in thinking that “publications” are paper-based for not very much longer. So much of their delivery vehicles have had to be reinvented over the past few years as users have come to expect access to electronic forms of the article ahead of paper-based delivery. The American Chemical Society just this year announced the first step to migrate away from paper-based delivery and I’m not aware of any of the Open Access journals delivering a paper-based format. A number of the publishers are already active with delivering enhancements to the articles that can only come by enabling electronic forms of the article. I include the efforts of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). In Chemistry especially the RSC led the cure with their award-winning Project Prospect semantic mark-up project whereby certain terms within the article would be “marked-up” and linked to information such as chemical compound details, definitions in the IUPAC Gold Book etc. The ChemSpider team developed our own version of semantic mark-up, called ChemMantis, and linked out from chemical names, reaction names and biological entities such as proteins, enzymes, bacteria etc out to the associated Wikipedia record. We used the ChemSpider database as the navigating layer to help link from chemical compounds out to chemical vendors, analytical data and related publications. We ended up producing a “ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry” to house Open Access articles submitted to us by the community. Many of these were synthesis procedures and took advantage of our mark-up capabilities to enhance the article.

I believe that Elsevier’s Article of the Future could be a good representation of what electronic articles might look like in the future. I can only envision that the production of such articles will be very labor-intensive for the foreseeable future until processes are optimized and authors assume more of the additional load associated with producing an electronic article of that form. Alternatively, and more likely, an increasing amount of the article formatting will be farmed out overseas due to a more advantageous price point.

What is the ChemSpider Synthesis and what do you mean by “all things synthetic?”

One of the outcomes of our delivery of the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry was a series of submissions of synthesis procedures. By the third issue it was clear that there was a bias to using the platform to expose organic syntheses – short articles explaining particular reaction transformations…generally single step syntheses defining starting materials, products, experimental conditions and associated analytical data. Ultimately, it was turning into a “reaction database” of synthesis procedures. Our intention with ChemSpider Synthesis, an interim name for what we will deliver, will host short articles regarding synthesis. They will be peer-reviewed using a blog-like feedback system where comments will be posted to the article. The community will be asked to contribute to the content and, in parallel, we will harvest synthesis procedures from the RSC archive of many tens of thousands of articles.

Could you please discuss the concept of public peer review and how might that change the current quite rigid tenure system? How do you encourage young scientists to get involved in Open Science in general and ChemSpider in particular? Jean-Claude Bradley seems to excel at outreach to chemistry faculty and young scientists and you to scientific societies, database managers in government and industry and to publishers.

Public peer review is, in many ways, already happening. The blogosphere has fast become an environment where science and publications are openly discussed and critiqued in the public eye. Take for example the recent blog discussions regarding sodium hydride as an oxidant that were conducted on the TotallySynthetic Blog . This blog post openly critiqued science reported in JACS and in the process removed the journal and the authors from the exchange. Since such “peer review” is already occurring online, and the example given is not the only one, the near future will see peer review and commentaries being posted directly to a publication online similar to what we are seeing already in the blogosphere. Authors will be held accountable to their work not only by original peer reviewers but also by the community at large. This will take some gentle navigation in the early days to deal with potential flame wars and open attacks but ultimately is likely to become mainstream and expected from the publishers. Personally I believe it will be quite some time before such openness will have an impact on the tenure system and such a system is entrenched, in my opinion, in local organization politics and relationships over productivity and scientific impact. At the end of the day interpersonal relationships and conformance to an organization’s expectations and needs will define tenure conversion.

Speaking of Jean-Claude Bradley, could you please give us your views as to who excels at what vis-à-vis raising the public profile of Open Science? Do you agree with my characterizations here:

Jean-Claude Bradley: The main conduit and public face of Open Science to working chemists in academia. Ambassador and guide to Open Science to non-scientists. Explicator extraordinaire on the actual practices and value of Open Science and Open Notebook Science in particular.

JC is like the “billboard of ONS” and I mean that in a positive way. He speaks from the heart regarding his passion for ONS, he demonstrates true value and benefits to the approach, has brought together a team of disparate collaborators to produce demonstrations regarding what openness, services and a willing group of people can produce as an outcome. JC focuses his efforts on spreading the word, takes no offense when people don’t support the direction and knows that, ultimately, ONS will have a growing prominence in the future.

Cameron Neylon: Tools meister and theory man. Connector to industry (e.g., Google vis-à-vis Google Wave, and Elsevier.) Tireless and charismatic advocate and astute analyst of key developments in Open Science.

Cameron is a connector too. He is passionate about Open Science and a masterful communicator. Some of his blog posts for me are very much “I wish I’d said that…” in nature. Cameron has a way of bringing clarity to the challenges we face, offering some solutions but in a way that he is not wedded to his approach but to a solution. He is a bridge-builder and, in my opinion, single-handedly got science and Google Wave connected efficiently with the Google staff. There are many people discussing Google Wave and a number of people working with the technology but Cameron has marshaled us into action. He is a trusted evangelist for how such solutions can be applied to science and has the ear of many people, mine included. I just wish we could do more faster to support his vision!

Michael Nielsen: Thinker and theoretician on Open Science of a philosophical bent.

As with most people I have met who are involved with Open Science Michael is passionate, opinionated, thoughtful and fearless. I’ve met Michael only on two occasions, one of these where we shared the podium at the Library of Congress. His presentation was reflective in a way that it calmly called us to attention and action around Open Science. He has the ear of the publishers and some of his blog posts have the community listening, wondering, concerned and optimistic all at the same time. It depends on WHO you are in the community! As I am now in publishing this post was particularly interesting.

Andrew Lang: Supporter of all of the above and master of the nuts and bolts of the tools and technologies of Open Science.

It’s been many years since I saw the A-Team (but I hear they are making a new movie!) but if you ever saw it you’ll remember that you could lock the team in an old garden shed and with baling twine, an old lawnmower and a deck chair they’d be able to make a top notch speed racer. Andy is that character in the world of plugging together online resources to the benefit of those doing Open Science. He’s worked with JC Bradley and used Google Docs, Web Services and Open Data to publish a book on Open Solubility Data on Lulu. The paper co-authored with JC regarding Chemistry in Second Life does a great job in detailing how he is a plumber using the necessary tools to get a result. We’ve worked together with ChemSpider and the Open Spectral Data on the database to create the Spectral Game, both 1D and 2D . Andy is fast, efficient and not shy…I appreciate him asking us for things he needs…it improves our services and he gets to give away to the community for the benefit of all.

Bora Zivkovic: Organizer of the key Conference ScienceOnline (where you will give a presentation this year on ChemSpider) and influential blogger.

Bora is wonderfully influential, easy to talk to, very connected and prolific. He is very valuable to me keeping me connected to what’s going on in the world of science through his tireless communication via all of the delivery systems he uses. He is a master of the social network and a true evangelist for online science. You’ve seen how much work he has done on his blog so far to draw attention to ScienceOnline. While he is not the only one working on it he has a very loud voice, in a good way, in drawing attention to the conference. It’s been fully booked for months…and in this economy. It lends credence to the quality of the meeting as well as to how Science Online is becoming more high profile. Good!

Antony Williams (that’s you): Builder, innovator and creator of key tool of Open Science, ChemSpider. Master of building basic platforms of Open Science and standard science and adroit and effective leader of outreach to mainstream scientific societies and organizations.

Is that about right or am I way off here?

I’d define myself as an Idea Guy with a try-it-and-see mentality. I’ve worked in government labs, in academia, in Fortune 500 corporate America, in small start-up transitioned to established presence. I now work for a British publisher and have owned two of my own companies. There is a place for ideas in all places of course but the smaller the organization the more likely it is that you can run in many directions trying out various things. In our domain that only holds true if it requires sweat and intellect and not capital investments. So much was possible with ChemSpider because the platform was cheap and the investment was intellectual sweat. I still like to try out many ideas in parallel if they have low time investments. Some of the greatest pay-off projects I’ve ever been involved with come from such investigations. There are others who I judge work in a similar way and getting a lot done with minimal resources…Andy Lang, Rich Apodaca and Egon Willighagen among them.

Despite my recent roles that have been more business oriented I still think of myself as a scientist and try to keep my hand into NMR though it’s limited today to software algorithms for NMR prediction and computer assisted structure elucidation. There’s a list of my papers on Mendeley and a couple of new ones in preparation now. I am fortunate that I have remained engaged with ACD/Labs at a technical level and get to work with some of the best intellect in the world in terms of NMR prediction and structure elucidation algorithms. I believe that to improve it is best to surround myself with people I can learn from and that invigorates my grey matter!

Could you please discuss the concept of ChemSpider Everywhere and how ChemSpider is linked to from blogs and provide examples of open source applets and ChemMobi—in the latter case could you provide us a scenario of how a scientist might use ChemMobi while, say, in the audience at a talk at a scientific conference or in a chat with a graduate student during a chance encounter in the hallway of a chemistry building?

The concept behind ChemSpider Everywhere is that our web services will allow those systems and scientists needing access to ChemSpider resources will be able to get to them. I’m living a kind of “Intel Inside” mentality where structural information based on curated dictionaries connected to associated data can be fed into systems as necessary. Where is this happening already? Our web services are already integrated to mass spectrometry software from Bruker, Agilent, Waters and Thermo. There is interest in tapping ChemSpider to retrieve chemical structures associated with mass spectral data so they will fire off a file from their processing software and hit a subset of the ChemSpider database, generally a set of databases containing drug-related and metabolism information (KEGG, Drugbank, Human Metabolome Database etc). When they hit the database with a query for monoisotopic masses and narrow the search on these databases they will generally retrieve an appropriate set of hits and these are not just structures to embed into their software but links to ChemSpider with all of its rich resources.

Our intentions is that ChemSpider will be everywhere…in an appropriate manner supporting the community. We welcome more ideas of what that would look like…but are not short of our own!

What is an InChl and what is an InChl Resolver and why are they important?

An InChI is an international chemical identifier and is a way to represent a chemical structure in alphanumeric text. A very basic definition is on Wikipedia and that gives some basic figures showing how a chemical structure breaks down into a series of alphanumeric layers to describe the complexity of a chemical structure. ChemSpider was built on InChIs as a way to deduplicate structures and allow fast structure searching. InChI is becoming part of the connection network for chemistry online and I provided an overview of both internet-based chemistry and how InChIs are important to creating a structure searchable internet in a recent presentation to Drexel university students (available as a video on SciVee).

From my initial blog post we took the feedback and with the kind support of the RSC we went off and built an example of a resolver. It’s a proof of concept and what is necessary is really a federated approach where multiple resolvers can be integrated. We are presently in discussions about this with other parties and a federated resolver will be available, in proof of concept form, later this year.

Could you please discuss your work with Wikipedia and your reactions to its recent move to be less open and more reliant on expert editing? Is that a good thing or bad thing vis-à-vis ChemSpider and for society at large and for Wikipedia itself?

The best overview about starting the work was written almost two years ago now. What was initiated after a conversation with Martin Walker from the Wikipedia Chemistry team was a project whereby we would examine every chemical compound on Wikipedia, atom by atom, bond by bond, and validate the correctness of the displayed structure relative to its association with the chemical name, the CAS number, the PubChem link and other related data. What started out as a project that might take a couple of months is only now nearing completion. It has involved discussions literally down to a single stereo bond as it did with Tacrolimus.

I confess that I am only slightly aware of the situation of Wikipedia becoming less open and more controlled in its editing. On ChemSpider we have always had users, curators and master curators, proactively acknowledging skills upfront and giving more responsibilities to certain parties. This has worked pretty well for us. Wikipedia should be grateful to all contributors. Certainly the contributions of experts to validating and enhancing articles will be very important. Personally I think articles on Wikipedia are, in general, very useful when they are more than stubs.

Could you please discuss ChemSpider’s relations with PubMed and other services of the National Library of Medicine?

Our relationships to date are simply those of using PubMed services/API to access information and data to link up to ChemSpider. PubMed is truly an amazing resource and our connection last year delivered at the ACS really raised some eyebrows regarding what’s possible as a result of integrating public resources with the appropriate programming interfaces.

How is it going with the RSC? Do you have any advice for those who have created Open Science tools that start to garner interest and acquisition offers from mainstream publishers and scientific societies?

It took a while to migrate the ChemSpider platform into the RSC environment. We were moving the system from three fairly nominal servers running in a basement to an infrastructure based on virtual servers. We also moved from a “continuous beta” where we were updating code to the live environment on a regular basis to an environment where we had development servers, test servers and live servers. This migration took a while but the benefits are that we have full IT support now and are not carrying all the responsibilities for maintaining the hardware, the backups, the core software platform (SQL server, IIS etc). We also have less risk in terms of power outages and the pipes serving up ChemSpider are much thicker. The benefits to the user are obvious…better uptime and faster overall response from the site.

In terms of people who have created Open Science tools and want to garner interest in terms of acquisition my suggestion may be quite contrary. Don’t pursue the sell off as the endgame but build the appropriate solution for your users, develop a following and let your success speak for itself. I believe that’s what we did well…we created a solution of value to the community, stayed focused and on task and let the community speak on our behalf regarding the value of what we were building. Hopefully the publishers and societies are watching and will engage.

What are you most proud of vis-à-vis ChemSpider? What have been the biggest challenges since you started working on it and what has been particularly gratifying about the relationship with the RSC? What are your plans, if any, for expansion in the US?

I am most proud of the fact that we stayed true to our vision of “Building a structure centric community for chemists.” We have been upfront and honest in all of our discussions with our users and the community via the blog and on many other public forums. I believe that we have earned the respect of our users and am humbled by the number and quality of scientists who have been willing to support and work with us.

We have no immediate plans to expand in the US at present and need to balance expansion of the ChemSpider resources with overall project needs. Our team is not involved only with the delivery of ChemSpider but with a number of other projects to support cheminformatics within the organization.

What scientific conferences do you recommend that young scientists interested in Open Science attend?

You and I will both be at ScienceOnline2010 in January 2010. That would be a good one for exposing people to what’s going on with Science Online, much of it Open. Many of the major conferences in any of the sciences now have sessions regarding data sharing and Open Science..it’s just a matter of looking for the session. Certainly my experiences with the Google SciFoo camp, one I was fortunately invited to on two occasions, was one of exposure to a lot of Open Science…unfortunately it’s invitation only.

What blogs should they read? Yours for one, right?

Mine is at http://www.chemspider.com/blog/. In recent months I have stopped visiting my RSS reader as much and look for what dribbles onto Twitter from the blogs and navigate over. Ones that I visit regularly are 1) Science in the Open from Cameron Neylon, 2) Useful Chemistry from JC Bradley, 3) Michael Nielsen’s blog, 4) John Overington’s CHEMBl’og, 5) the Mendeley Blog and 6) ALL of David Bradley’s blogs. I read a lot of others also, but this is a short list.

Whom should they follow on Twitter?

I’d suggest following David Bradley, Timo Hannay, Duncan Hull, Egon Willighagen, Cameron Neylon, Rafael Sidi and Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine). What these gents have to say is specific to my mixed domain of cheminformatics and publishing so may not be of interest to chemists directly.

Should they immediately jump into the lively Life Scientists room on FriendFeed?

As with all forms of social networking tools online I would say that people need to have an interest in such an environment to begin with. Many people don’t read blogs yet, many are unaware of what RSS feeds are, Twitter would be an annoyance and FriendFeed just one more on the list. It is a very small fraction of the community that is using these tools but it is growing of course. I find FriendFeed of value to ask questions and engage a group of domain experts in discussion but the reality is that, for me, this is a tight knit community and I could engage the majority of them directly by email. I believe that Cameron Neylon and JC Bradley have had success in using FriendFeed to initiate projects and activities around funding applications. The truth is that there are so many groups to interact with and so many activities already underway for ChemSpider that I have backed away a little from all of these tools of late just because of time limitations. I’m focusing instead on building closer working relationships with a select group of people with whom I can get things done and produce an outcome or measurable output. I found that I was losing a lot of time in a week on conversations that didn’t lead anywhere. An interesting discussion was recently started here.

What are your plans for ChemSpider for the next year? For the next five?

ChemSpider was conceived in December 2006 and released to the public at the Spring ACS in Chicago in 2007. In terms of a functional system it’s less than 3 years old and having a 5 year vision would be as simple as having chemists think of ChemSpider as their first port of call to source information about “chemicals” as well as host information about chemistry. Information about chemicals will include properties, data, associated literature, suppliers, associated scientists, Open Notebook Science pages, links to information in other databases and data sources and so on. Hosting information about chemistry will include the chemical substance itself but also associated data, synthetic procedures, analytical data etc. generated within a scientist’s laboratory. If we can make this happen at a minimum then we have delivered a foundation dataset and appropriate set of web services to feed the developing semantic web for chemistry. In so doing we will have, hopefully, delivered one of the primary search engines supporting internet-based chemistry.

Finally, who are your heroes in chemistry, science generally, academia, technology and in any other aspect of life?

My heroes in chemistry are people who I believe have directly mentored me in a way that has led to an improvement in my understanding of some aspect of my work. In this list I include Gary Martin who has taught me much about NMR spectroscopy (and we have published a lot together!), Keith Preston, my PostDoc supervisor, now retired, who taught me much about how to question experimental observations and Mike Detty and Steve Godleski who I worked with at Kodak running many midnight experiments just out of interest and passion. I’m sure that none of these people will be recognizable names for your audience.

I’m also hoping to use some of my energy to raise some money for asthma as one of our sons is asthmatic. If anyone out there is connected into the asthma not for profits and can connect me up that would be great. Let’s see how it goes!

Thank you for your time, Dr. Williams.

And what’s more, one or more of the winning essays will be published in Computers in Libraries Magazine. I have had any article published in it and was that a proud day for moi.

Now, is that way cool or what!? I have always wanted to go to that conference. Put your thinking caps on, everyone!

The deadline for submissions in December 15.

And for those of you who don’t like writing, the sponsors are admirably flexible and say, “…So, we’re going to encourage submissions in a variety of media. If you’re video-oriented or you’re a graphic designer, or you make awesome collages, or you’re another kind of artist, we want you to submit an entry for the contest.

They will even accept poems!

Hmm, how about

Searching:

Those who wish to find
Info of a certain kind
Find themselves in cyberspace
Sorting through a database
And not just one but many such
Spending days or even much
Longer as they try
To recall the reason why
But, alas, with scant success
How they got into such a mess

On a more serious note, I spend a huge amount of time looking for grants and scholarships in the health sciences to list on the site I work on, ScanGrants and my dream federated search application (by the way, federated search is the ability to search many databases simultaneously instead of slogging through one after another in tedious succession) would be one that would search through ScanGrants and various other free online listings of funding opportunities such as that offered by Duke and that of Britain’s National Health Service and that would also be able to seek out any funding opportunities offered by the many disease advocacy organizations listed by such admirable groups as NORD – the National Organization for Rare Disorders and the Genetic Alliance.

What is needed is a powerful search tool that would enable research scientists that don’t have access to powerful platforms such as Elsevier’s SciVal Funding or Community of Science to be able to leverage free resources such as ScanGrants and the others I have listed. There are free grant listing databases, but we need a federated search tool so that researchers who are not affiliated with wealthy institutions can find funding quickly and easily so that they can get back to work on science, which is in the interest of all of us given that we will all be patients someday.

Thank you, Abe Lederman of Deep Web Technologies and Sol Lederman of the Federated Search blog for sponsoring this contest.

Go for it, potential contestants!

You and I talked on the phone and this interview is a follow on to that chat.

I have worked in a medical library, but I must confess that although I had heard of the TRIP Database, I had not used it in my job. Given the importance of the evidence-based medicine movement, I appear to have been quite remiss in not utilizing the TRIP Database.

Let’s start with the basic terminology of medical search. You use the word “database” in describing TRIP. Now, like most people in the medical library field, my mainstay tool was PubMed, which uses this wording, “The PubMed database comprises more than 19 million citations…” And yet when I did a Google search on the term “PubMed” I also saw such wording as, “PubMed is a free search engine,” “an online US Government index,” “an online library” and so on.

And on the TRIP Database homepage we see the wording, “TRIP Database – Clinical Search Engine…The TRIP Database is a clinical search tool designed to allow health professionals to rapidly identify the highest quality clinical evidence for clinical practice.”

Could you please delineate for us the differences between a search engine, a search tool and an online database and provide examples of each? For example, how would you categorize the grants and scholarship listing I work on ScanGrants? It is a search engine, a database or both? I helped create it and I am not sure what it is! Help!

Unfortunately, I’m not the best person to ask! I imagine there is much overlap between them all and in many ways they could be viewed as synonyms. If they are not strict synonyms, I imagine people use the terms in such a manner.

What does TRIP stand for?

It initially stood for ‘Turning Research Into Practice’ but we dropped that many years ago, simply using the term TRIP.

Could you tell us about your own background and that of your co-founder and co-director, Dr. Chris Price? I note that you started TRIP in 1997. What was the impetus for the creation of TRIP? Was there a defining moment or did you and Dr. Price just feel that clinicians lacked access to the information they needed to provide topnotch care to patients? Could you elaborate on this, “…a chance conversation led to the spreadsheet being converted to a crude web-based search engine?”

I’m a scientist by training and Dr Price is a general practitioner (similar to the American Family Physician). I ended up working for the NHS and was asked to try and improve the uptake of evidence. I spoke to a large number of health professionals and they clearly said they wanted us to answer their clinical questions and not to send them on training in appraisal and searching – they didn’t have enough time. It was as a result of that I started the ATTRACT (Ask Trip To Rapidly Alleviate Confused Thoughts) service which is still going strong. As part of the process of answering the clinical questions I found I went from site to site and each site visit added time to the answering process, so I decided to make a list of all the documents in an excel spreadsheet; recording the title, URL and date. At the same time I was thinking of starting a website for ATTRACT and had a conversation with a man in the office opposite, who was an early web enthusiast. He said he could make the spreadsheet searchable – and he did. The same reason we started the TRIP Database (making clinical Q&A easier) is still going strong and we’re still heavily involved in Q&A (see www.tripanswers.org). We’re even thinking of starting a journal of clinical Q&A.

Can you tell us in what circumstances a PubMed or Medline search are just are not enough? And while you are at it, would you please tell us the difference between PubMed and MEDLINE and how TRIP differs from each?

I think there are important differences. PubMed/Medline are massive databases of – mainly – primary research literature (clinical trials etc). In the world of evidence, primary research is deemed to be less strong/robust compared with secondary evidence. Also, most people searching today are used to searching Google. That approach won’t work with PubMed. TRIP differs in that we allow users to search across a large body of secondary research, primary research and etextbooks. Our aim is to allow users to find answers to their question using the best available evidence. If there is no robust secondary research we’ll return primary research. Also, our aim is to make the search similar to that seen in Google. So, in essence we want to make it as easy as possible for clinicians to find the most robust evidence for their search query.

You say on the TRIP site the following, “The evolution of the TRIP Database has been guided by the desire to answer real clinical questions using the principles of evidence based medicine.” I want to parse that sentence so that I can grasp matters better.

For example, could you give us two real-world examples of “real clinical questions” and why a physician would use TRIP to answer them? For instance, in what scenarios would she be better advised to use PubMed only, TRIP only, or TRIP first or PubMed first? What other online resources (free or otherwise) might she consult in addition to TRIP and PubMed? Do you have any special advice for American users of TRIP (given that you are UK-based)?

Lots to discuss there! I’ve got experience (personally and my teams) in answering over 10,000 real clinical questions. I would always start with a TRIP search and that’s a firm part of the various Q&A methodologies. Say the question was ‘Are statins useful in the elderly?’. A search of TRIP immediately returns a number of high quality, secondary reviews on the topic. Searching PubMed with the obvious search phrase ‘statins elderly’ (as most non-librarians would attempt) yields pretty unhelpful results.

You highlight that we’re based in the UK, around 70% of our usage is from outside the UK and our content is not tied to the UK, far from it. We want good quality evidence from wherever it has been produced. You’ll see from the site that we have 5 separate geographic areas for our guidelines: USA, Canada, UK, Australia & New Zealand and ‘Other.’

Let’s talk about evidence-based medicine. In the age of Obama, we hear a lot about the US government’s drive for “comparative effectiveness” to be taken into account in the practice of medicine. Could you please tell us how comparative effectiveness differs from evidence-based medicine or are they, in effect, synonymous? Do you forecast the Obama administration’s emphasis on comparative effectiveness increasing utilization of TRIP by American medical providers?

As I mentioned above I’m not the best person to ask about definitions. They may not be strict synonyms, but here is the definition of comparative effectiveness in Wikipedia :

As for increasing traffic, it might well do so. As it happens, the USA already counts as our top country for traffic (tied with the UK).

You say on your site, “TRIP remains the internet’s leading resource for evidence based medicine.” What are other such resources? Please list some as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Have any of them, for instance, come along in the last year or so? And do they identify themselves as search engines, as databases or as both?

There are lots of search engines that have come along in the recent years. The barrier to entry is quiet low (compared to 5+ years ago). To be honest I don’t spend too long on these other sites, so am not really in a position to comment.

You also say, “TRIP have recently created an advisory board with wide representation.” Who is on it and from what fields and nations do they come?

I hope this doesn’t appear too evasive, but I’d prefer not to name names. Principally as we’ve never really discussed terms of reference and I’m not sure if I have people’s permission to name them! However, I would say that the vast majority are not ‘big’ names that people would recognize. We just have a group of around 70 people who I can turn to seek advice on various issues. There’s an even split between health professionals and information specialists. Geographically, they come from all over the world e.g. UK, USA, Mexico, Argentina, NZ, Australia, Germany, Spain, Peru.

Let’s talk about user feedback. You say, “We receive, and welcome, feedback from users asking about features they’d like to see…” and I was pleased that during our phone conversation you listened to my suggestion that users of TRIP be able to set their search parameters by date, given that users want to be able to search for items dating, say, from the last two years, last year and so on. You said that that feature is in the works for the next upgrade. Could you tell us when that upgrade will be announced and what we might look for in it? Can you give examples of who wants what upgrades and how you prioritize such requests? For example, do certain medical specialties want certain features? Do medical librarians ask for such and such whereas nurses (are they big TRIP users?) want this and that?

The main inputs for change come from two main places. Firstly, there are ideas I generate myself and these tend to come from using the site to answer questions or seeing what mainstream search engines are doing. Secondly, feedback from users. This latter group is essential as it gives a different perspective – so we love hearing feedback/constructive criticism.

In addition we’re re-writing TRIP Answers and releasing a lot of self-test education based on our repository of Q&As. This latter feature allows a user to select any question, record what they think the answer is, we then show them our answer and then they comment. This sort of learning (reflective learning) is deemed highly educational and is a component of education in the UK setting.

Can you tell us how TRIP is financed? You say, “We have an exclusive advertising deal with eHealthcare Solutions.” The ads on TRIP seem unobtrusive. Is advertising your primary source of income or do you receive support from the UK’s National Health Service? From foundations? Are you an employee of the NHS?

TRIP is trying to diversify its income streams and have been moderately successful in this aspect. However, we always have more ideas than money, which is frustrating. But the main income streams are as follows:

As for myself, I still work 2 days per week for the NHS.

One feature I found interesting in TRIP is your openness to other search tools. For example, I tried in TRIP my favorite search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and saw at the bottom of the page, “Not found what you’re looking for? TRIP might not have the answer, but these other sites may…” and you list SumSearch and Google. I am not familiar with SumSearch. Please tell us a little about it.

I’m very keen for users to find what they’re looking for. I believe it’s arrogant to believe that my site (or indeed any site) will answer all the questions users have. So, why not plug in some tools to help users if TRIP ‘fails’. I’ve known Bob Badgett (the associate professor responsible for SumSearch) for a number of years. We’re both interested in the same thing and have approached the problem it in different ways. Bob’s approach is to use contingency searching in that he’s automatically tweak searches to return only a modest number of results. I’m not an expert of SumSearch so best to look at the site for yourselves and read this ‘proper’ explanation.

As for incorporating additional search features. I have no plans at present, but if a particular tool is highlighted that can bring significant extra benefit to TRIP (well, TRIP users) then I’d be keen to add it.

And given your willingness to feature other search tools (like SumSearch) does TRIP have any plans to partner with other health-related or research search tools such as Mednar or DeepDyve?

And speaking of DeepDyve, they have some pretty neat widgets and you offer one of your own:

Or would you even classify that as a widget? Indeed, let’s talk about the adoption of widgets in the healthcare industry and in the world of medical libraries. Many medical libraries are setting up intranet-based pages at their institutions as well as public Web sites for the use of those of their patrons who happen that point to be outside the firewalled institutional electronic environment and who are always offsite. Many medical libraries are also setting up sites primarily designed for use by the general public. And it is not just medical libraries that are doing so, but marketing departments at community hospitals or major medical institutions as well. Could you tell us who has placed a TRIP search box on their sites and who might benefit by doing so? For example, there are quite a few bloggers on the subject of medicine and health. Would they regard your widget as a nifty freebie offering to visitors to their sites? How would that work, exactly?

We don’t keep track of who has the widget! An example of it being used can be seen here.

As for installation, it’s relatively straightforward (and we can advise) in that we supply a few lines of HTML code and they user needs to add that to their site. This is very easy for blogs but a bit more complex for traditional websites.

Let’s talk about the rise of social networking and social media and how they have overshadowed the once hot topic of search. How is TRIP adapting to and leveraging the power of social computing? Could you tell us about doc2doc, for instance and your relationship with the BMJ Group (itself a fascinating example of a mainstream medical publishing firm embracing the power of the Web for the dissemination of its offerings and engaging users fruitfully).

It’s an interesting topic and the future in medicine is difficult (for me) to predict. Our particular doc2doc tie-in will be launched properly in the near future. Again, it comes back to our desire to help users find the information they need. If TRIP fails they can try SumSearch, but they’ll also (if they’re a health professional) be able to ask clinical colleagues on doc2doc if they can help. We’re hoping the relationship will be mutually beneficial.

Aside from doc2doc we’re starting to examine the potential for a social aspect to TRIP. This has been fuelled by the large numbers of people signing-up to My-TRIP (a free feature that gives extra benefits to users e.g. auto-searching, recording activity etc.). We’re currently at 1,300+ after just two weeks. Each person records a profession, a country and clinical interests. As I see these people joining I see connections. These connections are either professional (e.g. nurse to nurse), interests (e.g. oncology to oncology) or geographic (e.g. USA to USA). I think we could do some interesting things in this area. However, the lack of funds will mean we can’t rush into this space. But, I (supported by the advisory board and others) will continue to work on ideas and see what happens.

And still on the subject of Web 2.0, I notice that under Sources searched by TRIP you list wikis, Webcasts and podcasts. (But not blogs so far?) Is that something unique to TRIP in the world of medical search and what do you see as the promise and challenges for databases of such new genres as online video journals like the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)?

Actually, we now search three blogs and we’re pleased to have taken the step. I’m sure we’ll add new blogs in the near future.

As for videos, our system can handle them and we had planned to roll out a video search. Unfortunately, we do not have the resource at this stage. That aside, the challenge with video search is for a user to locate an appropriate video. The only searchable aspect is the title which is problematic. For example the title of a video might be ‘Pharmaceutical approaches to diabetes’ and this might include a significant discussion on metformin. A user searching for metformin and diabetes would not find that video!

You include images among your search results. Is that also something that sets you apart from other medical databases? Where do you get those images and how do you determine their worth for your users?

Our medical images are a work in progress! It certainly does separate us from other clinical search tools. Medicine can be very visual, most obviously in dermatology. In the case of dermatology, if you’re unsure of a diagnosis it’s helpful to be able to see examples of things like rashes! Aside from dermatology, it can be useful to see examples of CT-scans, x-rays etc.

We created a bespoke spidering system to grab content from medical image sites that we’re aware of e.g. hardin.md. Currently, we’ve got a lot of images, not all of which are appropriate (e.g. they may be part of a banner) so we’re gradually editing the image collection to improve the quality.

Do you think that in some ways, given the rise of Open Science and the microcontent and preprint cultures, publication in journals as we now know them is becoming almost an afterthought or even unnecessary? How do you see projects such as Elsevier’s Article of the Future affecting the world of medical search and clinical research generally? Will such things leave frontline clinicians mostly untouched or will even a family doctor have to cope with the fact that articles will become fluid, ever-changing entities?

Unfortunately, this is a topic I’m not overly familiar with. Knowledge in medicine is already fluid, in that new research, advice affects the knowledge base on a regular basis. One issue is the speed this diffuses to clinicians. Will this improve things, I’ve no idea!

When we spoke on the phone, you spoke quite passionately and feelingly about TRIP’s relationship with HIFA2015 and mentioned a rather fascinating idea you are toying with of offering a button on TRIP that would enable those conducting searches to fairly painlessly add an article to a database of medical literature specifically designed to be of use to those providing medical care in resource-poor settings, specifically in the developing world. Now, that is an excellent idea in many ways (although I would say that when I do a search I really don’t have the time to think about poor countries and what their particular needs and resources might be—I am just trying to get my work done in an industrialized country and help those in my immediate orbit). Is there a term for this sort of thing? Altruistic searching, maybe? Has it been adopted anywhere else?

I’m excited by this idea as – if it works – it’s an easy model for others to adopt. Basically, we want to crowdsource the identification of content suitable for resource poor settings. TRIP has lots of such content, but it is ‘hidden’ by the ‘noise’ of articles based on setting such as the UK and USA. So, a user from the developing world (with bandwidth issues) may need to wade through content which is good evidence, but not applicable in their setting. If even a small number of users start ‘tagging’ content suitable for such settings it’ll allow users to restrict their search to content ‘suitable for resource poor settings’ – making a very focused search. The old adage about user participation on the web is that 90% of people will not interact with a site, 9% will do so occasionally while 1% will do so actively. We currently get around 35,000 visits per day, so 1% is 350 people per day potentially tagging articles. It’s certainly not for everyone, but the cause is ‘just’ so I think people will be inclined to get involved.

As for a name, altruistic searching might work, a quick Google shows terms such as Crowdsourcing Philanthropy and Crowdsourcing Altruism! The notion of crowdsourcing altruism was seen when Steve Fossett went missing. In this situation very recent maps of the area where he may have disappeared were added to the web in bite-sized pieces (I think it equated to 10m x 10m of land) and users were asked to look for plane wreckage and click if the area was ‘clear’ or not. It never found the plane (as far as I’m aware) but did locate a number of other planes that had gone missing over the years!

What is CPD and what is its value?

CPD is continuing professional development. It’s dawning on me that this is a very UK-focussed term and I should use a different term. In the UK (and other countries) there is a requirement for health professionals to stay up to date with the latest evidence, this is a key component of CPD. It’s value is that if a clinician can’t demonstrate they’re keeping up to date it could affect their ability to practice. TRIP has released a way for clinicians to easily record what they’re looking at and also to assign reflective notes to a particular article. These reflections are aided by three guide questions:

We’d like to use this approach for the USA but it’s an area I struggle to understand. In other words, in the USA is this approach deemed appropriate CME!?

Let’s talk Twitter. You say on your blog:

“We’ll be working on a mechanism to link TRIP in with Twitter.” How would that work?

This may or may not go ahead. Basically, each month we add lots of great content onto TRIP. So we thought we could drop topic specific content as a twitter feed. In my mind you might follow a broad area e.g. cardiology or specific e.g. cholesterol. As new content is added to TRIP we’d tweet it. It’s another way of people keeping up to date.

And still on the topic of Twitter, whom do you follow on it and what are some of your favorite Twitter tools?

I use tweetdeck which is wonderful. I follow around 250 people and these can be seen here .

You are considering adding a search wizard. Why? And how would it work?

This is another ‘wish list’ item. Currently, most searches on TRIP are single term, which is often problematic (search term vague = vague results). The search wizard would attempt to walk people through their clinical questions/scenario to unpick the important elements. We’d then use a modified version of the search to return a small number of results. Theoretically great, but in practice – we’ll see!

You also say, “Semantic analysis. We’re working hard to bring a semantic analysis function (a similar principle is used in PubMed’s related articles feature).” Would this resemble DeepDyve’s More Like This tool, which is pretty slick and could you do something like their Content Highlight tool

I discussed the related articles function earlier in the interview. I was not aware of deepdyve, but yes it’s a similar approach and that ‘more like this’ tool is relatively straightforward to set-up.

How do you see TRIP in a year? In five?

My primary aim is to make sure TRIP’s financial base is secure and we’re pretty confident. We get approached fairly regularly (1-2 times per year) from people wishing to invest. So we may take advantage of this one day. But aside from stability I want to keep developing TRIP to make it easy to use for clinicians and to ensure it serves their purposes. If they have a clinical question I want TRIP to answer it. Longer-term I’d like to see TRIP adopt a social aspect, some form of community and that can only make us stronger. Ultimately, I would like us to be even more widely used and still innovating.

What groups are not using it that you think really should be and why? Can you give a breakdown on usage numbers in terms of total traffic and by profession and specialty?

Who should use TRIP? Anyone who wants to locate robust research evidence to support their clinical practice! TRIP has been specifically designed for this function and it does it pretty well!

As mentioned earlier we get around 30-35,000 visits per day. Around 30% are from the UK and a similar number from the USA. The rest of the traffic comes from English-language countries (e.g. Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with India seeing a surge) also we get lots of traffic from Spain and South America. As for professions, 70% health professionals 30% non-health professionals. Of the 70% around 35% are physicians. As for specialties, we’ve no real idea. However, we are capturing this via My-TRIP so that’ll start giving us some decent statistics in the near future.

What aspect of TRIP are you most proud of and what has been your greatest challenge or frustration with it?

I’m most proud that we’ve managed to create a cutting-edge product that large numbers of people use to locate evidence to support their practice.
In other words we are helping to Turn Research Into Practice.

The challenge/frustration is one of funding. Being independent is great, but it has drawbacks. The NHS search (NHS Evidence) has £15 million funding a year while we operate on a lot less than 1% of that! We want to innovate, have lots of great ideas but not always the money to implement them.

Finally, who are your personal heroes in science, medicine, search, technology and in other field?

I’m not particularly into heroes as such. However, there are people I admire a great deal and have helped me directly or indirectly. To name a few I’d go for Noam Chomsky, Paul Glasziou (Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Oxford) and Muir Gray .

Thank you for your time.

It’s been a thought-provoking pleasure.