Sharing articles from Pubmed/Springerlink etc with lab members/departments and collaborating research groups

[Gilmer]

Dear All,

 

I am currently a PhD student in the Radiation Oncology Department at UCLA. I have thought for a long time that it will be really beneficial for my lab if we were sharing the interesting articles that we find on the web with each other .

 

I tried to implement a system in my department and I went to Connotea/ Mendeley / Citeulike, etc etc. However, all of these networks are reference management systems and none of them offer the experience (and the rewards in that sense) that social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc do when you share something. These vertical scientific social networks are more about managing references than what they are about sharing. To give you an example, if you click the Import button on any of them they take you away from the page you are, make you fill in information, etc etc. Therefore, I did not get anyone in my lab to share any article.

 

To try to solve this problem, a friend of mine and I coded www.koomel.com which basically gives you:

 

1. A button (which is really a link) that you could drag and drop on your browser bookmark bar. If you want to share any article just click it and you will share it without leaving your current page.

 

2. A link for you to send to the people in your lab/etc so they could see where the articles are (and they could also send articles there with the same button/link )

 

3. A link to get your lab and the labs of your collaborators to share articles together.

 

We are trying it in our department but as I am there, the experience for users is really different because people ask me how to use the system,etc.

 

Because we want to get this right ( I am a huge believer of this idea) I would appreciate if any of you could use the beta system at www.koomel.com and give me your opinions (bad or good) about the system.

 

 

 

Thanks, Gilmer

Edited September 24, 2011 by Gilmer