Those who attempt to regain control of communications face outcry. Certain corners of the Internet have been erupting in argument in the past weeks following an announcement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York that it will henceforth require scientists who blog to ask the permission of presenters before firing up computers or mobile phones and publicizing their findings.
"For adoption of new technologies in science, it has to be an order of magnitude more useful than current tools. We just don’t have the time to waste learning new tools that only marginally increase our productivity." Discussion: http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0/bceaea67/scientists-still-not-joining-social-networks
"free, social networking site that enables scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals to connect, collaborate with ... world-wide scientific communication and incorporates the newest social networking technologies." - "Yet another Facebook for Scientists that I am unlikely to use." http://tinyurl.com/55ngbf
For collecting and disseminating scientific information, the most popular tool is Wikipedia (70.4% of total respondents), followed by emailing peers (67.9%), and online forums (42.0%). Those pursuing professional development are most likely to email their peers (49.4%), utilize the LinkedIn network (43.2%), or visit Wikipedia (39.5%). Social networking is most popularly practiced with Facebook (59.3%), emailing peers (49.4%), and blogs (42.0%).
Since the reason for the variable degree of success of online social tools for scientists is largely attributed to the lack of participation, I think a great way to pull in participation by scientists would be to offer that kind of value up-front. You give it a paper or set of papers, and it tells you the ones you need to read next, or perhaps the ones you’ve missed. My crazy idea was that a recommendation system for the scientific literature, using expert-scored literature to find relevant related papers, could do for papers what Flickr has done for photos.
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.