Connecting online holds myriad professional opportunities.
By Sean Ekins, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Imagine you are the only scientist with a specific expertise. It would be a pretty lonely existence perhaps, until someone needed you. But there is no guarantee anyone will ever contact you! Perhaps this is close to what it was like as a scientist in the early 20th century, no distractions, and you could focus all your time on your research. Communication was slow, travel was limited, and your only interaction with other scientists from outside your own institution would be at the few learned societies. Collaboration, if it happened, would likely be exceedingly rare.
Now imagine the present. You need to do something outside of your own experience, perhaps a new experimental technique, or you just don’t know how to use some sophisticated software or other technology. What is the first thing you do? Perhaps you ask a colleague, go to someone you know who does that “thing,” maybe search the Internet, or see if there is an instructional video on YouTube. Maybe you post on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Slack, or perhaps tweet for help. So, when people ask how the Internet has changed science, you really don’t have to look far. Most grants are submitted online. Pretty much all journals are online, and all papers are submitted online. Imagine the current generation of scientists, who have never known a time when papers were submitted as hard copies by mail no less!
Of course, this immediately dates my generation that has bridged the predigital and current environment where there is no other option besides online. Scientists live in challenging times, and technology should make it easier on us. Antony Williams, Lou Peck, and I recently published an article1 that discusses some of the freely available online tools that could be useful for scientists. If only it were that simple. Just the process of writing the article and running it through one of our employers for approval opened up some unique opportunities to think more on why we were writing about something that all scientists should be using. We know that the online technologies (and the algorithms underneath them) have changed virtually all aspects of society from what we watch, read, listen to, buy, etc., but oddly science and scientists seem to be slow to take advantage of it.
Generational Divide
Do we teach students of any type of science how to forge a career in an online environment? Do we know how to effectively get scientists to collaborate online, let alone collaborate in general? The answer to these questions is probably NO. There will always be early adopters and late adopters, which we can think of as the latter day “haves and have nots.” In science, I perceive a clear boundary between generations, between those who communicate electronically and those who, believe it or not, still prefer to communicate face to face. So part of the challenge is just to get scientists online in the first place and sharing their science.
Without wishing to sound like a grumpy old man, online technologies and tools can be more demanding of older scientists and perhaps older people in general. LinkedIn has replaced our CV, and if you are older, it will take longer to fill out your profile with accomplishments and then link to the many contacts you have built up over a 20–30 year career. If you are a fresh graduate, you just don’t have this problem. Your social network is your school, and your CV is relatively short. Recent graduates aspire to a robust LinkedIn profile, but perhaps they invest less effort in LinkedIn than Facebook or swap photos of their experiments on Instagram, or use Snapchat to post a video from a conference. There are hundreds of online tools, and you could be in one of maybe thousands of social networks. The seasoned and the nascent scientist may never fully cross paths online. This is the early 20th century scientist all over again, and it presents a problem for collaboration.
New Collaborations
Personally, my use of online software has led to many new collaborations, which in turn have led to grant funding directly attributed to the initial connection. In addition, a tweet I posted from a science conference changed someone’s life. I tweeted that there was a poster on a new clinical trial for a form of Sanfilippo syndrome. Within minutes I received a tweet from a family in Europe asking for more details. A year later, I met them at the same conference. My tweet led them to enroll their child in a clinical trial that could potentially change the outcome of the disease.
How would I suggest we use the online technologies to help foster collaboration?
Focus on only one or two online tools, and put all your efforts into these—try to engage the community.
Keep your posts professional and informational. Let people know what you work on, what science interests you. If we can teach scientists to use online collaboration, then it could be an effective influencer of offline behavior.
So, get online! Collaborate! And, perhaps, if nothing else, it could lead to breaking down walls between research areas and even between nations.
Sean Ekins, Ph.D., D.Sc., is CEO and founder of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (www.collaborationspharma.com) and Phoenix Nest Inc. (www.phoenixnestbio tech.com); he can be found on Twitter as Collabchem.
References
1. Williams AJ, Peck L, Ekins S. The new alchemy: Online networking, data sharing and research activity distribution tools for scientists [version 1; referees: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research. 2017;6:1315. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.12185.1