The question is instead why people aren’t adopting those tools.

Inertia is definitely the explanation. I’m of the opinion that people will adopt the technology when they’re ready. Of course, the value of social software grows as the number of users increases(to a point, then things have to change again), so you eventually want everyone to join in. In order to bring the conservative, traditional types on board, it has to reach a critical mass and tip over into the status quo. There’s nothing you or I can do to bring in late-adopters except reach out to the people who are willing to give something a try, and make sure to only recommend the best-of-breed, sure-fire applications to them. Connotea could certainly be better, but I think it’s good enough to start recommending. It’s dead simple to use, and really adds value to your reading.

Very few are going to be willing to risk their careers and make that leap until it’s an established practice.

On the whole, I’m not talking about taking any kind of huge gamble. I guess if I was egotistical enough to think that everyone cared about what I was doing and was watching my every move, but too paranoid enough to think I was too far ahead to be caught, then I would fear the scoopage more than I do, but as it is I’m not worried. My problem has been that I’m not getting enough notice, rather than too much. I guess it all comes down to an individual’s tendency towards risk aversion, doesn’t it? I’m not expecting change anytime soon, but I do think there’s a significant upside to understanding the field well enough to know what’s going to work and what lies ahead, and minimal risk. I read something in SEED Magazine recently talking about how humans tend to be more risk-averse than pure rationality would suggest. There are also arguments that the reason America has become a global leader is because of our increased risk tolerance relative to our European brethren. Clearly, I’m fairly risk-tolerant because I’m both young and optimistic. One day, I’m sure I’ll be the one shooing the kids off my digital lawn.

I think it’s clear now that we’re coming from two different perspectives. You’re trying to see things from the perspective of the average user, whereas I am presenting the arguments that seem compelling to me. Uptake by the majority just isn’t part of how I judge the value of something. I don’t know when Connotea is going to reach name recognition with Joe User, but I don’t think it’s because it’s not idiot-proof enough, and if you can update your facebook or myspace page, you can write a blog. Doing it well, now, that’s another story, and perhaps that’s what keeps some people away, but that’s nothing that can be solved by technology.

Waiting for adoption is a system of microattribution, below the level of a whole document, that is compatible with the collaborative nature of shared databases, blogs, and wikis, but even now I think a little bit of effort in establishing an online identity can go a long way towards getting you noticed, without taking away from your chances of getting that Nature paper. However, as you say, reputations are at stake, so you’d better be able to write well and present yourself in a professional manner. The only way to learn to do that is trying and failing a few times, so it’s clear to me that you’ll come out looking best if you’re prolific and make sure that the signal that’s the loudest is the one you want to be the loudest. That’s a strong argument for having an online presence, no matter who you are.

I may not be the best test case for most of these tools anyway, as an editor, I have different needs than a bench scientist. But I have managed many an e-mail list for various groups. On the single lab scale, it’s fairly trivial.

As for Open Science, it’s an interesting ideal, and we’ll have to see if it is indeed the future. As one of the articles you linked to notes, “Open science barely exists at the moment — infancy would be an overly optimistic term for its developmental state.” If so few are participating in this philosophy, then we can hardly expect the tools to be widely adopted, at least not at the moment, can we? And there will always be questions of pragmatism that stand in the way of idealism. Very few are going to be willing to risk their careers and make that leap until it’s an established practice. If you’re a postdoc in Cell Biology and you’re about to hit the job market, would you rather publish your big paper in Nature or in PLOS? Which is more likely to improve your job prospects? Is making a stand for that idealism more important than paying the rent? I’m not saying any of this is a bad thing, I’m just saying that it will require a fundamental shift in the culture of the life sciences for it to reach the mainstream.

It’s hard enough to get a grad student to ask a question during a big talk at a meeting, let alone to start critiquing the work of others online. Careers and reputations are at stake here, so people are going to move very slowly and very carefully. You can certainly call that “closed-minded” or “resistant to change”. I’d call it prudent and cautious. If you have a family to feed or a lab full of employees to pay, it’s hard to live on the edge like that. Those in the mainstream will certainly benefit in the long run from those who are willing to push boundaries. But they’re very different breeds with very different needs. The mainstream will eventually catch up, but don’t expect it any time soon.

And as for the iPhone, if you don’t like the term “smartphone”, blame it on Reuters, not me:
http://tinyurl.com/yq3gp7

Note that those sale numbers were for July, when the price as $200 higher. With the price drop, sales have only increased:
http://tinyurl.com/26ld43

And remember, you are an early adopter, you are someone comfortable getting under the hood of your technology. You are part of a tiny minority, and the iPhone is not designed for you. Yes, the soldering comment was an overexaggeration, but given the steps necessary for unlocking, it wasn’t that far off for most people.

My argument is that the tools just aren’t that compelling yet (key word is “yet”).

Connotea is one application that everyone, from a big lab to a small one, could benefit from using, and the startup effort is so small that I don’t know why everyone isn’t using it. I mean, you’re already reading articles, and you’re already doing something in order to remember where you read what, so tagging something once you’ve read it seems like a small effort, and being able to easily find it when you want to reference it more than makes up for the minimal one-time effort of registering an account. Then the added value of seeing everything in context, by browsing similarly tagged articles, or users who’ve tagged similar articles, is just lagniappe. You aren’t factoring that in, because you just don’t know how valuable it can be. Try Connotea out for a while next time you are researching a topic and then let me know whether or not you find it compelling. As far me…well, as I was writing this, I found a great post on open science on the Connotea “open science” tag page.

[not worth] investing a large effort at this point…

Stay tuned. It’s so much less effort than you think, you’ll be surprised.

Are you willing to allow for the possibility of being scooped because you put up all your data in a publicly visible forum?

Yes, and it’s not only me. Do a look around for open science. You’ll find plenty of people. JC Bradley is a huge supporter, as well as Rosie Redfield, and many others. As you can see from the Romeo database of publisher copyright policies, most publishers support some form of self-archiving, and I fully expect deposition of data in a central database to become a requirement for NIH-funded work over the next 5-10 years. The MIBBI project is laying the groundwork now.

Biotech companies are a different breed. Let ‘em be as secretive as they want. Who has historically discovered the important things first, companies or academic researchers? I guess where you come down on this depends on whether you think you’re better off with a smaller percentage of a larger pie. The secrecy and control is for protection of profits, but pharma would do well to look at what’s happening to the record companies.

The scale of tracking 30 e-mail addresses isn’t all that daunting, and bandwidth doesn’t seem to be much of a pressing issue for e-mailing out pdf files to a small group.

I’ll have to defer my comments on this until you’ve tried managing an email list and working with Connotea for a while. Connotea makes existing things easier, sure, but the truly compelling benefits are things you just don’t know you need yet.

Keep in mind that familiarity trumps superiority every time

This is what all the discussions eventually boil down to when I talk with someone who’s pessimistic about the technology. Yes, cognitive lock-in does exist, even among scientists, and it’s a barrier to entry for the average user. But do you, personally, want to be average or do you want to be great? Remember, those who remain resolutely close-mined and resistant to change are the ones who become more and more irrelevant as time goes on. (q.v. the RIAA) I’m not an indiscriminant tech evangelist, but I really do think that Connotea and open notebook blogs are right for any academic scientist, and wikis are great for the smart and productive ones. Have you every been to Myspace? If those people can write a blog, surely us scientists can figure it out.

given that it’s outselling all other smartphones on the market

OK, this is off-topic, but I have to say something.

Point 1:The iphone isn’t a smartphone.
Point 2: It had large numbers for the launch month, but sales have drastically dropped since then. Look at the mad crowds in this picture taken on launch day.
Point 3:In conclusion, this.

As far as the soldering iron requirement goes, well, there was a software unlock out before the firmware update. My Nokia, OTOH, was unlocked by simply entering a code provided by AT&T on the keypad.

I’m not arguing that it’s “too soon” at least as far as anyone being able to grasp the concepts of what these tools offer. I’m arguing that it’s “too soon” because we have yet to see the “killer app” that suddenly makes sense to everyone. When you’re talking about new investigators, early adopters and those on the bleeding edge of technology development, you’re talking about a very small minority. It’s often hard to see this if one is a part of the blogosphere, surrounded by that small minority. Yes, the current tools can be adapted in some interesting ways, but they don’t seem to have caught the interest of Joe Scientist. The original argument was that it’s because Joe Scientist doesn’t know these tools exist. My argument is that the tools just aren’t that compelling yet (key word is “yet”).

You are right in that there can be benefits to being a founder. At the same time, there are also lots and lots of people who have put in lots and lots of effort into technologies (and companies) that have gone nowhere. Most scientists are already pressed for time, so investing a large effort at this point that may or not pay off is perhaps too risky. Those hours spent blogging or tagging articles could instead be spent doing experiments or actually physically networking with other scientists at meetings/talks, which still is a stronger currency than leaving comments on a blog. Founders can be rewarded, but remember, they’re always going to be a small group–if everyone jumps in at the early stage, then there’s no founder effect. Those who take the risk and do the work will, if they’ve chosen wisely, reap the rewards. You can’t ask everyone to be a founder–it doesn’t work that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, particularly the concept of, as you put it, “opening your notebook to the world.” The question that immediately comes to mind is whether that is antithetical to the way biology is done these days. Theoretically, it’s a great idea, but given the competitive nature of research these days, how open are people really going to be with their unpublished data? While I’m a firm believer that it’s better to have collaborators than competitors, not everyone shares this philosophy. Are you willing to allow for the possibility of being scooped because you put up all your data in a publicly visible forum? Will the editors of Science care that you had the data up on your blog first when someone else has already published a paper showing the same concepts (which they got from reading your blog)? With so many scientists funding their labs/homes with their patents and universities so dependent upon those same funds, how supportive are they going to be toward a premature release of data? Labs at a biotech company obviously don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing, let alone what they’re reading, what protocols they use, etc. As a publisher, we’re often asked for private versions of our journals/book websites that can be run from within a company so no one has any access to the user stats that company generates.

Clearly this cut-throat manner is not the best climate for doing research. If you haven’t read it, Jim Watson’s “The Double Helix” gives a fascinating portrait of what it was like to be a biologist before the molecular biology revolution. Things were done in a much more “gentlemanly” manner (pun intended, at least as far as the gender emphasis goes). Watson and Crick were told they couldn’t work on the structure of DNA because a different lab at another institution was already working on that problem, and that it wouldn’t be fair to butt in. Now that’s the other extreme, you have problems that would end up not being solved because you didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. There’s got to be a happy medium somewhere. As computational biology continues to rise, we’re starting to see the influence of the open source movement inching its way into biology. Hopefully this is something that will continue to grow and alter the competitiveness and secrecy of modern research.

The other main point I was trying to make is that to overcome the inertia we both agree exists, applications need to be easier to use. They need to be obvious, simple and attractive. It’s interesting you bring up the iPhone here, as I used the iPod as my earlier comparison. I wouldn’t call the iPhone’s penetration lackluster at all, given that it’s outselling all other smartphones on the market (at least in the USA). While the Nokia N95 is a sweet phone, it’s overkill for what most people are willing to do on their phone. The iPhone is still rough in its execution, but it has the right idea, a simple, easy to use, compelling package that doesn’t take much futzing about, doesn’t require you to go to the command line, etc. Again I think you’re seeing things from the minority viewpoint–the few thousands of folks out there who modded their iPhones and are now being very vocally negative about it online are a drop in the bucket compared to the million plus phones sold. They’re the equivalent of those currently building and using the new tools for science. Pioneers to be sure, doing interesting work, but there should be no surprise when Joe iPhoneUser refuses to break open his case and take a soldering iron to his hardware.

It’s a lesson we learned when we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (ah, the dotcom days) to create the now defunct molecularcloning.com, which was essentially an online version of our best-selling manual (”Molecular Cloning”, AKA “Maniatis”). It never saw the mass uptake we expected, and the reason is that when given the choice of going to the computer, going to the site, signing in, finding the protocol you want, printing it out, then going to the bench, or, grabbing the book off the shelf and going to the bench, most people are going to opt for the latter. There’s no “there” there because the tools are still too clunky. Back to Connotea–most journal clubs are a lot smaller than 100 people, usually just one lab or a few small labs coming together. The scale of tracking 30 e-mail addresses isn’t all that daunting, and bandwidth doesn’t seem to be much of a pressing issue for e-mailing out pdf files to a small group. As far as the Connotea link being accessible anywhere, you’re assuming an always on internet connection, whereas I can read the pdf I’ve been e-mailed on an airplane, or take the printout to sit poolside. Ink on paper, as old an interface as we have, and it’s still one of our most effective and most popular ones.

Keep in mind that familiarity trumps superiority every time (as shown by this study in particular http://tinyurl.com/ytz8j7 ). To get people to switch, you need to go beyond just “better”, you need over the top compelling. And that’s my point. There’s nothing compelling out there yet, nothing tailored so well to biologist’s needs that switching to it is an obvious decision.