Dr. Martin Fenner is a clinical fellow in oncology at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany. At Gobbledygook ( http:// blogs.plos.org/ mfenner ), he blogs about how technology can make it easier for researchers to conduct and communicate science. Follow him on Twitter as @mfenner ( http:// twitter.com/mfenner ). Questions and answers have been edited.
Q: You've created your own applications to make science more social. What sparked this interest?
I have been interested in programming for a long time.
During the last five years I have developed two Web-based applications we use daily at our university hospital (a clinical trial registry and a program for chemotherapy orders).
My blog is really about the daily frustrations of a researcher with the limitations of current technology. With the applications I developed more recently, I therefore tried to combine my experience as a researcher and medical doctor with my interest in programming to overcome some of these limitations.
Q: What are the challenges to adopt a more networked science?
The main challenge is probably not technology, but rather the incentives for academic work. Researchers are valued by their publications and grants, and other contributions to science - producing research data, communicating science, teaching, etc. - usually fall under the table.
There are many efforts under way to change the incentive system, and I'm involved in two of them.
Open Researcher & Contributor ID is a global initiative to give every researcher a unique number. This will make it much easier to identify these contributions. Altmetrics looks beyond citations of scholarly papers as a means to measure the impact of science, like number of downloads, bookmarks, blog posts and tweets about a paper or other scholarly work.
Q: Do you think the scientific community is moving fast enough in facing these challenges?
Science is surprisingly conservative and is probably moving slower than some other fields in adopting new technology. Which is surprising since some key technologies were really invented by scientists for scientists.
A more networked science makes a lot of sense for science as a whole but at least initially offers little extra value to the individual researcher. This makes change difficult.
