If it is useful, they will come
Ask a scientist what blogs, wikis or social networking sites they use, and you’re likely to draw a big blank stare. But make something useful, such as software that helps geneticists replicate one another’s experiments, and you’ll have users coming in droves. An article by Lila Guterman from the Chronicle of Higher Education this week reports on trends in online tools for scientific collaboration at the annual conference of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.