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Regular readers of scientific blogs such as this one must be aware of the uses of social media and blogging in scientific communication. We at GigaScience find it very useful in communicating the progress of the journal and database, as well as news on our travels around the world. On top of GigaBlog you can also hear our exploits on twitter, facebook, google+ and friendfeed. As it has now overtaken twitter as the worlds largest microblogging site, Chinese speakers can also follow us on Sina-Weibo. Slides from our many conference presentations can be viewed from our slideshare account, and some of our talks are also up on the BGI youtube channel. Research collaborations cross all borders, and from our main base in Hong Kong we hope the internet enables us to reach out to a much less geographically isolated audience. A growing one too, as in the last week we have just broken the 1000 follower barrier on our twitter feed.

Journals such as PLoS have shown the benefits of article level metrics, and once our journal launches we will be maximizing the visibility and accessibility of our research using these modern mediums. The BioMed Central platform we are publishing through gives readers the opportunity to comment on research, easily share it via various social media networks, as well as view metrics on the most highly accessed articles in the journal. With the database we have been promoting data-citation, and with growing interest in "altmetrics" and post publication peer-review, many feel that this data can complement (and even rival) more traditional metrics such as the impact factor. Being involved in the efforts to crowdsource the deadly 2011 outbreak E. coli genome (dubbed the first "tweenome" by some) demonstrated the potential twitter has to become a novel form of data dissemination. As the scope of our journal is "big-data", the growing corpus of data generated linking these altmetrics to the huge body of scientific literature is a particularly interesting side-effect, and one we'll continue to follow and promote.
If you don't already, follow @GigaScience.

Posted at 03:07PM Feb 27, 2012 by ScottEdmunds in Open Access  |  Comments[0]