Scientists and RSS

I was at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week demoing Onfolio to get an idea of how some hard-core researchers would respond to it, and I learned some interesting things.

1) There are more devices than you can imagine for making rats do things they don't want to do. Check out the brochure I got for a device we dubbed the "rat walker."

2) The state of the art for richness and reach in showing people your research appears to be toting a poster of your work to a huge hall and then standing in front of it for four days talking to people about it. (Some scientist friends of mine thought it was a bit "cute" how I didn't know that these poster sessions are a staple of scientific conferences.)

3) Nobody has heard of RSS. I gave demos to 15 people, all of whom were heavy computer users (to the point where they were using a product called EndNote to manage their references) and only one of them had even heard of RSS. Even the one person who had heard of it seemed a bit sheepish, making me think that he had just overheard a couple IT people talking about it while waiting in line for $5 Chinese food at the catering truck outside the lab.

The researchers that I talked to all seemed to have an intuitive sense of the value of RSS, and I think that they will be an early growth area for RSS as more researchers blog about their research and as more journals and publications use RSS to notify people of new research. Right now, though, there doesn't seem to be much of that going on.

Comments

[David Bradley Science Writer]

Hi

Interesting to see your comment about scientists not being too hot on RSS. I have only really begun to realise the full potential in syndicating my words using RSS, One area that it might be incredibly powerful for active scientists is in the preprint arena. It might be possible not only to release one's up-coming papers and posters through RSS but with comment space like this on their blog, researchers could get immediate feedback and so fine-tune the paper ready for actual publication.

Just a thought

David Bradley Science Writer

[David Bradley Science Writer]

As I'd predicted (although it's really just 20:20 vision in retrospect). The eprint physics arxiv is available as an RSS.