Chemistry online is represented in various ways including publications, presentations, blog posts, wiki-contributions, data depositions, curations and annotations. Encouraging participation from the community to participate in and comment on the information delivered via these various formats would likely provide for a rich dialog exchange in some cases and improved data quality in others. At the Royal Society of Chemistry we have a number of platforms that are amenable to contribution. This presentation will provide an overview of our experiences in engaging the community to interact with our various forms of content and discuss new approaches we are utilizing to encourage crowdsourced participation.

1. Challenging, cajoling and
rewarding the community for
their contributions to online
chemistry
Antony Williams, Valery Tkachenko, Alexey Pshenichnov,
Will Russell, Jack Rumble and David Leeming
ACS New Orleans April 2013

2. The Web 2.0 World of Contribution
A Web 2.0 site allows
users to interact and
collaborate with each
other in a social media
dialogue as creators of
user-generated content
in a virtual community

3. Web 2.0 is actually OLD!!!
• We have been contributing
to the web for a along time
already – but how much in
chemistry?
• A few blogs, an increasing
amount of tweeting but
what about data sharing in
chemistry?

4. Contributions in Chemistry
• A small number of high profile social media
aware and engaging chemists
• Some WONDERFUL content on Wikipedia…
• Some great blogs but so few really…
• So what can we do to encourage participation?
“The Measures of a Scientist are Changing”

5. Scientists are “Quantified”
• You are already being quantified
• Your stats are gathered and analyzed
• Employers can find them, tenure will depend
on them, and these already happen without
your participation
• Scientists Impact Factors, H-index and many
other variants.

7. Ratings were “available”…
now its online

8. You are Being Quantified…

9. ResearchGate

10. The Alt-Metrics Manifesto
• http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

13. AltMetrics via Plum Analytics

14. Usage, Citations, Social Media, Etc

15. Detailed Usage Statistics

16. Enabled by
• Persistent unique digital identifier
• Integrates to workflows such as manuscript
and grant submission
• Supports automated linkages with your
professional activities

17. Your Profile as a Scientist
• If you are an active scientist – i.e. already
published, active researcher, generator of data,
early, mid- or late career there is lots to do!
• If you are a junior scientist the benefits of
investing time now will provide a strong
foundation for your future!
• So what do I do??

18. Places to “Publish” for Profile
• Blogs – easy to setup, generally free, part of the
portfolio of contribution
• Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, etc.
• Contributions to Wikipedia and other wikis
• A myriad of chemistry communities
• Publish chemicals, syntheses and data
• AND be rewarded and recognized via AltMetrics

19. Tweets are “publications”

20. Presentations
Presentations,
Videos, Report,
Pre-publications

21. YouTube/Vimeo/SciVee
• Presentations are easy to turn into movies
and publish to these services
• Literally “gives you a voice”

22. Data as a Publication

23. With Us…Data to ChemSpider
• 28.5 million chemicals and growing daily
• Community contribution
– Deposit structures, property data, spectral data
– Collections of data
– Associated directly with the depositor
– Annotations and curations all logged to user

24. Write about Syntheses

25. ChemSpider SyntheticPages

26. Submission Process
• Simple template-based submission process
• Submissions reviewed by editorial board.
• Online Peer Review process
• Crowdsourced expansion?
– A few regular dedicated authors only
– Online peer review and feedback small but useful

27. Crowdsourcing – does it work?
• Just over 200 people EVER have deposited or
curated data
• ChemSpider SyntheticPages small group of
authors
• Database hosts make the largest contributions
• ChemSpider staff tend to do the most curation

28. Contributions

29. Curations
• 2009 – 8255 curations by 43 people
• 2010 – 10014 curations by 66 people
• 2011 – 16025 curations by 116 people
• 2012 – 13127 curations by 74 people

30. Depositors
• 2009 91 unique depositors
• 2010 120 unique depositors
• 2011 99 unique depositors
• 2012 120 unique depositors
• “The crowd is small – very small”

31. Where do we need “crowds”?
• The ChemSpider backfile – 28.5 million chemicals
• DERA- Digitally Enhancing the RSC Archive
– Chemical name conversions
– Reaction validation
– Figure extraction and conversion
• ChemSpider Reactions
• Optical Structure Recognition algorithm testing
• Reviewing incoming data

32. ChemSpider

33. ChemSpider Reactions Comments

34. Structure Recognition Validation

35. Spectral Conversion

36. Digitized Spectrum

37. Comparison of Spectra

38. How will it improve?
Participation, contribution
WITH
Rewards and RECOGNITION

39. Rewards and Recognition
• The badgesonomy culture
of recognition is growing.
• Badges are commonplace
– FourSquare
– Klout

40. Rewards and Recognition
• Rewards and Recognition
starting with CSSP then
expands to other platforms
• Including paths to expose
such recognition on
AltMetrics platforms

42. Challenger
• Integrated commenting, curating and validation
platform across ALL eScience and publishing
platforms
• All integrated to a central RSC profile and
feeding the AltMetrics tools

43. Where we are now…

44. Future Recognition on
Data
IC50 Measurements for 62 substituted benzoxazoles
ChemSpider Data Repository: DOI: 10.1356/CSID784.4

45. Future Recognition on Plum Analytics?
ChemSpider

46. Twitter Contribution
#RealTimeChem 2013
Twitter-based community
project designed to
encourage chemists to:
– actively engage with one
another online
– by sharing what they are
working on
– at any given time

47. #RealTimeChem Already Active

48. And Gone Mobile…

49. #RealTimeChem Awards

50. Acknowledgments
• RSC eScience team
• David Sharpe for passion re. R&R
• William Brouwer – Penn State
• All of those tools and systems

51. Thank you
Email: williamsa@rsc.org
Twitter: ChemConnector
Personal Blog: www.chemconnector.com
SLIDES: www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams