Friday, April 11, 2008

New paper-protocol-lab-knowledge sharing website out of Stanford

Stanford PhD student Jason Hoyt in the Department of Genetics was fed up with the inadequate presence of literature resources on the web, specifically good discussion surrounding papers, so he's set out to build his own website that would allow users to post, rate, and discuss papers, in addition to other features. Jason says,

Hey fellow colleagues and grad students. So, about a year and a half ago I got tired of the lack of good discussion around research literature online. For instance, what was the best review paper in the field of a new research project I was about to start? So, I started building a website.

What I ended up with was:
-A citation manager called 'My Libraries' (easily download papers to EndNote)
-A lab database called 'WikiGroups' for any lab in the world
-A protocols database
-A paper search that gives better results than PubMed (this depends on you adding more
papers)
-Import papers from PubMed
-Contact or colleague manager called 'Notes'
-A 'My World' page that gathers all the latest from your colleagues, lab group activities
and school seminars.

It's in beta, so please report any bugs or feature requests (form available on all pages).

It's called Ologeez. From the plural of the suffix "-Ology," it refers to every branch of learning. If you find it useful, let other departments or schools know.

After very briefly exploring Ologeez, it seems like a competent addition to the handful of other science oriented resource and knowledge sharing websites currently available. OpenWetWare offers lab websites and shared protocols, but doesn't have literature-oriented resources. PLoS ONE has a journal club feature, but just for PLoS ONE and PLoS doesn't host lab websites or protocols. Laboratree and SciLink offer nice networking and some content management features, but don't support lab websites and literature discussion is indirect at best. Although Ologeez has very few users and entries right now, people may find it useful to be able to set up a lab presence with shared protocols and papers, post and discuss interesting papers, and keep up to date with what their colleagues are doing, all in one website. It includes categories for all branches of science and research, including business/econ, law, and math.

Given its inclusiveness, it has the potential to spread school-wide, though it'll be interesting to see if it catches on enough for the discussion and search features to be useful.

2 comments:

Cameron Neylon said...

You can actually do literature sharing on OpenWetWare via using citeulike and the simile project product exhibit.

You can see an example of this here

I think the key thing though is agreeing some interchange standards so we can all use bits of all of these things.

The citeulike one is a good example. Use a specialist site for a specialist activity and then take the information from that in an agreed format (bibtex) through a generic tool (simile/exhibit) to put a specific presentation up.

Having said that, I will go over to the new site and have a look ASAP

Jean-Claude Bradley said...

Well you convinced me - lets see how it works....