From Me to We

This is my page. Here, I get to talk every month about whatever I want. I like that.

The editorial staff (there's half-a-dozen besides me) decide what's going to be in the magazine each month, and what stories we are going to report on the Web site every day. We like that too.

But things could be a lot - a whole lot - more interesting.

What if, instead of being a passive consumer of The Scientist, our readers played a role in shaping the content? We could have 700, or 7,000, minds thinking up and debating great story ideas, instead of just seven. Such a community could identify breakthrough research and commercialization opportunities before they received widespread attention. Or decide on the fields and firms that are being oversold. It could identify scandals, tag the unrecognized heroes and geniuses of science and business, and work out and test ways to communicate research.

We now have the capability to do these and many, many other things. Let me introduce The Scientist Community (www.the-scientist.com/community), our new message board.

The Scientist Community, like The Scientist magazine, is for everyone with an interest in the life sciences. It's free to browse, free to join, and free to use. The infrastructure is an intuitive and straight-forward set of tools that are organized to allow contributions in a wide range of formats. But the real power of the site will be the users-the community.

There's already a growing network of contributors on board, each of whom has a particular interest that he or she would like to build a discussion around. Some of these relate to The Scientist: I want to co-create new products and services with our readers and/or advertisers, using open communication and evaluation of results. For instance, our business development manager has come up with a competition for ideas for new supplements, with a (modest) prize included. (Past supplements have focused on topics ranging from advances in schizophrenia to model organisms to the life sciences industry in the Philadelphia region. Next month, we'll publish a regional supplement about Ireland.)

But that's just one node. There are all kinds of groups for different areas of research - for lab tools, for business discussions of all kinds, and for career development. I envisage these growing to encompass many thousands of communities built around specific topics. What about a gut immunology community? When I worked on the topic years ago, I got to meet with scientists working on similar projects maybe once a year; with a community site we could be in touch weekly, or daily. There could be a community based around applications of confocal Raman microscopy in cell biology, or one on the extremophiles meeting coming up in Norway. And on, and on. You'll be able to upload articles, slideshows and videos on the site. How about a community launching its own biotech, with the members offering IP, providing research ideas, venture funding, and so on: The crowd-source biotech. Taking it too far? Perhaps. But the scope is unlimited.

Our goal is to recover our costs of The Scientist Community from advertising on the site. On any profit that we make beyond that in the first year, we'll donate 50% to charity. Exactly which charity will be decided by all of us together-we'll give every member of the community a say in where we'll donate the profits.

This is a form of social networking, but the emphasis here is not on "social," it's on "work"-your work. The Community will be moderated, managed, and marketed: sign up for alerts we'll let you know what's going on and when. More than anything, I'd like to see a culture of experimentation - you may have a much more innovative idea than the ones I've talked about here.

Join The Scientist Community today, and let's see where we can go together.

rgallagher@the-scientist.com