From FriendFeed to Nucleic Acids Research.
Deepak Singh and Andrew Su have both already posted on their blog about it: I'm proud to be the second author of a paper published in the "Database Issue" of Nucleic Acids Research.
The Gene Wiki: community intelligence applied to human gene annotation
Jon W. Huss III, Pierre Lindenbaum, Michael Martone, Donabel Roberts, Angel Pizarro, Faramarz Valafar, John B. Hogenesch and Andrew I. Su
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkp760What I really like about this paper is how the collaboration started: last year Andrew asked for some help on FriendFeed, the Life Scientists:
.. I sent a mail and said I could possibly help , "et voila" !
Citing Andrew: I'd also be remiss if I didn't also note the critical role online collaboration played in this effort. Of the seven coauthors on this paper, two I've met only once in real life, and two I've never met in person. We are spread over four cities, five organizations, and nine time zones. Initiating and executing this collaboration happened virtually entirely online, aided by the FriendFeed Life Scientists room and Molecular and Cellular Biology WikiProject at Wikipedia. It was an eye-opener in terms of how effective online collaboration can be done.
Andrew, thank you again :-)
Pierre
2 comments:
Awesome work Pierre.
Also we should all be looking fwd to more people writing code to bring data in a form that can benefit from crouwdsourcing. Such as for example the NCBI gene pages, which are not much editable by the crouwds as they currently exist on their website.
But through NCBI's E-utils API, one can pull all the data about a gene (from sequence to pubmed artictle). If someone writes the code to pull those data, converted it in a wiki format and put it on wikipedia as the authors here did, then NCBI becomes editable by its users.
Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.
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