The Internet is here to stay. Besides its many advantages two major drawbacks are daily visible: (i) abuse of anonymity and (ii) lack of quality control of presented information. These two issues are related: if  an onymous (pun intended) person with an impeccable reputation endorses an article on the web, chances are high that the paper is indeed of quality.

If the number of clients, customers, or members of not-for-profit or commercial enterprises runs in the thousands, the executives of these organizations would like to bind their clients. Issuing trading stamps is a strategy that is already older than a century. Another line of approach, more suitable for our times,  is to build a virtual community, forum or network. Newspapers, scientific journals, and universities have created their interactive web sites. Software companies do it. These communities will only blossom if the group of customers is not too much of a mixed bag and if the customers get something valuable in return when joining. A possible benefit for joining is the facilitation of communication with other members or with the officials of the organization.

Read more... (1842 words, 7 images, estimated 7:22 minutes reading time)

I’m at a conference and I have noticed something that I have seen before: the top scientists are surprisingly nice. Now I wasn’t quite completely sure if this was true but at least some of my friends thought the same thing. Here’s is what happened. I’m at a conference that is a bit outside of my normal field, so I do not know most people but I certainly saw a lot of famous names of people who have published major papers in the field. I would muster my courage and just walk up to these famous people and say something pleasant to break the ice. Their reply typically is very courteous and you can see their eyes flitter to your conference badge immediately followed by a question like “where is Strathclyde?” Typically, you end up talking very pleasantly about science. In different situations I have found that top scientist tend to reply to your emails quickly, are happy to send you reprints (quickly), are happy to tell you about what they are doing.

Read more... (298 words, estimated 1:12 minutes reading time)

Last month, I had a research proposal rejected. I’ll keep a brave face and say that it might be a good thing as it shows that, no, really, I do not get them all funded. But really, it’s a pain the behind, of course, and a huge waste of time. About a month-and-a-bit wasted to be precise.

Read more... (537 words, estimated 2:09 minutes reading time)

Last week, my wife accused me of being rude. Not so much to her – although it’s quite possible that I am, she’s probably got used to it by now – but to others. This sort of happened because our son, Guus, is going to nursery school soon and we were interviewed by the head of the nursery school. She extolled the virtues of their bulletproof entrance door, which (according to her) had become a necessity since Dunblane. In case you don’t remember, “Dunblane” refers to a town in Scotland where in 1996 a mad man entered a school and shot dead several kids. Terrible obviously. However, I couldn’t help myself and started arguing that this was silly and that surely because this happened once in Britain, this was extremely unlikely to happen again, let alone at the particular nursery school that my child was about to attend. Her answer: “Belgium”. Clearly referring to another more recent occasion where a child was hurt. At this point, I decided to give up, judging that further discussion of probabilities or, say, Bayes theorem or shot noise wouldn’t really go over very well.

Read more... (519 words, estimated 2:05 minutes reading time)

When you are doing research, you tend to collect a lot of papers. I remember that at the end of m PhD, when I moved to another continent to do a postdoc, I dumped a huge box of photocopies in my parents’ basement. A few years ago, I had collected two cupboards full of photocopies. It was getting seriously out of hand. Then, of course, journals started putting everything online as PDFs and the same process started all over again but this time filling up hard disk folders instead. I used to have subject-based folders, which sort of worked until something fit within 2 or 3 or 4 of my subjects. Searching for some old paper you had read a few years back became more and more nightmarish. Then somebody showed me Papers.

Read more... (478 words, 1 image, estimated 1:55 minutes reading time)

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of science

Every discovery or invention is based upon previous discoveries or inventions. This is what makes communication so essential for science. ResearchGATE empowers science by connecting the scientific community. Our platform enables researchers to communicate faster, better and easier. This will accelerate the distribution of knowledge – and create new ideas.

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of every scientist

Being connected with co-researchers is a great advantage for every scientist. You can present your profile and your work, manage and extend your professional contacts, join or found groups, ask or answer questions, share or search papers and much more. This collaboration makes everybody’s work much more effective. And it’s free, safe and without spam.

ResearchGATE is designed for the upcoming age of Science 2.0

The tools offered by ResearchGATE are custom-made for researchers. No other platform provides such a wide range of web 2.0 applications exactly matching the needs of the scientific community. New features are constantly added, always state-of-the-art and no-frills. This makes ResearchGATE the best social network choice for scientists.

Read more... (228 words, estimated 55 seconds reading time)