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Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0
Saturday, January 16 2 – 3:05pm
B. Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0—where do they intersect? – Walter Jessen
Description: Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are defined as Web-based services for healthcare consumers/patients, health professionals and biomedical researchers that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual reality approaches to enable and facilitate (1) social networking; (2) participation; (3) apomediation (guidance generated and available from peripheral mediators); (4) openness; and (5) collaboration within and between these user groups for the purposes of maintaining and/or restoring human health. How are these themes being applied in science? What are the reasons some themes are better applied than others? How are researchers integrating Science 2.0 tools into their workflows? Do they offer an immediate benefit? Where could there be improvement? What are the social and cultural obstacles to widespread adoption of Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0?
Discuss:
Suggested reading prior to the session (PDF download): Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness
Online slideshow for the session: The Intersection of Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0
Slideshow slides (PDF download): The Intersection of Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0
Session follow-up
The Intersection of Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0 session at ScienceOnline2010 used an editorial published by Gunther Eysenbach in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) on Medicine 2.0 (PDF link above) as a foundation for discussing five themes that emerge from Web 2.0 in health, healthcare, medicine and science: social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration and openness. Slides from the session are available above.
Participants agreed that Science 2.0 currently consists of scientists talking to other scientists and to the public, specifically those people interested in science. Generalized social networks such as Twitter and FriendFeed have been more successful at getting scientists to talk to other scientists than science-specific social networks, likely because of features, especially those found on FriendFeed, and ease of use. Additional reasons why scientists aren’t using science-specific social networks may include commercial taint and/or suspicion of a publisher’s overall motive.
Apomediation — tools that help scientists to prioritize and filter information — are useful in helping navigate digital information on the Internet. Publishers have built several apomediation tools, such as 2Collab (Elsevier), Connotea (NPG) and Citeulike (Springer) but are not actively taking a role in mediating scientific information. Google Sidewiki was discussed as a new tool for apomediation, since it has a scoring algorithm that can distinguish relevant from not-relevant comments.
Several participants felt that commenting on an article online had far less value to a scientist than writing his or her own article. Low scientist participation may also be due, in part, to comment accuracy being tied to scientific credibility; others felt that it was due to scientists being accustomed to the literature method. With respect to openness, intellectual property issues (i.e. patent applications) often keep scientists from openly sharing data. The restriction of Tweeting prepublication results and the disparity between bloggers and mainstream media getting embargoed information is becoming a real problem for both scientists and journalists.
A transcript of Twitter conversation during the session can be found here.
