Earlier this month, naturejobs.com published a piece by Peter Fiske, chief technology officer of WAX Water Technologies, in which he claimed that scientists do not take enough of an active approach to their science, both in writing papers and in communicating their work to the public.

This ties directly into an idea I’ve had for a media project—a science social network. One of the key issues in science communication is a lack of a strong presence from the scientists themselves, actively talking to the public. Sometimes we get to hear them (or read them) speak in an article, but that’s the end of it—we never get any depth or detail on who they are and what they really are doing in their day-to-day lives. I think that opening this door would help make science more real and relatable to the general public, because right now there seems to be a great barrier between the two.

Currently, there are a few science social networks that popped up on the web over the past few years. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Brian Krueger, a molecular biologist at the University of Florida and founder of LabSpaces, a science social network and science news curation site.

Here is a write up of the key points of the talk:

Q: Why did you start LabSpaces?

A: Originally the whole idea was that, right around then, Facebook and MySpace were really starting to take off and I thought maybe that scientists would enjoy becoming part of a niche social network to discuss the latest research and trends and different techniques, stuff like that. My other focus was to help spread science news, which is really what the site has come to be right now. The goal there was to get scientists and the public interacting in the same place, talking about science. These days we have a lot of journalists who report on different stories but they don’t get their facts straight, so I thought that maybe having the scientists who are actually doing the research post about it on blogs, and be there in the community to explain their research in more details, would be pretty cool. But that hasn’t really started to pan out because there aren’t a lot of scientists who like to talk about their science to the public.

Q: Do you think that lack of direct communication between researchers and public is a central problem in science communication?

A: Yeah, I think that would really help bridge the gap between some of the mystique that goes on in the interaction between public and scientists. The public is afraid to talk to scientists because they think we’re all smart and stand-offish, and the scientists are afraid to talk to the public because they don’t know how to. So that’s where journalists come in, to try to help mediate that interaction. But it would be nice if scientists took a more active role in that process, and that was kind of the impetus behind the news portion of the site.

Q: What are some of the ways do you see getting around this?

A: I think that what ScienceBlogs is doing, getting scientists involved in scientific blogging, is important. That can really be helpful in the long-term because if we can get some of these scientists who are already into it to get their colleagues to start out and just blog here and there and get some feedback from the audience, I think that would be really cool. I think the other problem is that a lot of scientists don’t have a lot of time to be doing something that they don’t think will impact how their research is done. Scientists are kind of within their own close-knit community. They put the blinders on and just focus on what’s going on in their field, they don’t take a step back and say ‘hey the public is the one who is funding, maybe I should let them know what I’m doing’ and have them understand why fruit fly research is important, instead of, you know, Sarah Palin talking trash on one of the most important organismal genetic systems of the century. Or something like the mystique of vaccines causing autism, and having people stop taking vaccines. So I think scientists need to realize that what they’re doing is important, and it’s not just important for their specific scientific community, it’s important that everyone understands what they are doing and why.

Q: So in terms of LabSpaces, how do you plan to get scientists to start talking?

A: I think the key is to show scientists that there actually is value in that interaction with the public. But it’s really hard to know what scientists would value there. Does it increase their reputation to talk to the public? It seems that is more what scientists are interested in, is promoting their research, and I’m not sure that scientists feel that talking to the public is going to work its way back to the granting committee. You know, you don’t list how many times you’ve commented on a blog post, or how many blog posts you have when you apply for a grant. So it’s kind of more like a civil service than something that’s actually going to forward their research. Maybe what we need to do is work from the top down and get granting agencies to take into account the amount of interaction scientists have on social networks and talking with the public. For my site, I’ve toyed with the idea of coming up with a lab rank. Kind of like Facebook or Twitter where people can see how many lists you are on or how many followers you have. So maybe I need to start doing something like a lab rank where you can increase your rank by commenting on news articles or blogs or adding new publications to your profile.

Q: Did you have a background in web design before starting LabSpaces?

A: Web design has always been one of my hobbies. I coded my first website in 8^th grade I think, it was a site that I coded with HTML. And from there, every winter break, during my weeks off from school, I’d just sit down with a book and learn a new coding language. So I spent one winter learning Flash, and another learning JavaScript, and then PHP and MySQL for this “Facebook for Scientists” thing, so I just tried to keep on top of it that way. So yeah, it’s a self-taught coding experience for me.

Q: How important is it to have website coding skills when starting a business online?

A: I think if you look at people with the more successful internet businesses, like Mint.com, the website that just got bought out by Inuit—that guy was a web developer. He coded this whole site to manage your personal finances. Coded it entirely on his own, got some venture capitalists to fund it, and then hired an engineer. He started out as a coder and had a good idea, got venture capital investment, found one someone who was a good coder that was just sleeping on someone’s couch in San Diego to be his engineer, and they bust out this thing and then he gets bought out for $170 million. So I think that’s the way to do it, either you know someone that can really help you get off the ground running, or you put that coding time in yourself.

Q: So are you the only one working on LabSpace?

A: It’s just me. The site doesn’t actually make much money, just enough to cover the hosting fees for the site. Every month I’ll go out and e-mail companies asking them to sponsor the site or to advertise, and until I’ve broken the 100 thousand pageviews per month barrier, I’ve had absolutely no interest. But now I have 2 companies on board now to sponsor me for a couple of months to run a contest. I’m going to try to get other people to help me submit news links on the site, because it’s come to be that I’m spending 2 to 3 hours a day updating the site with science news releases. The idea here is to have a contest and offer a prize package to the top two or three submitters of these news stories and links every month. So we’ll see how that works, maybe that will incentivize the Twitter community, at least. But yeah, right now, when I have this post-doc job, being a scientist myself, and trying to spend 2 or 3 hours a day on the site, it’s hard to find more time to add more features and try to bring more people on.

Q: When you’re starting a networking site, how do you get people to join in the beginning?

A: When I first started out I invested probably $2,000 of my own money, even though I’m a broke college student, for Facebook advertising to try to get people to join the site. Right now there’s about 500 people registered, but I’m the only regular person on the site. So that $2,000 was a waste. If I was to do this all over again I think I would have written a business plan and spoken to venture capitalists to try to get money and advertise properly. Its also really hard to get a user-base started on a site like that unless you have a group of 10 of your friends that are really behind you on the project to help spread the word, because if you don’t have that critical mass, it’s just going to turn into a science news website (laughs).

Now, If you go back and think about how a website like ScienceBlogs started, it’s a group of maybe a hundred scientist bloggers, so what happened was Seed magazine thought it’d be cool to have a bunch of blogs by scientists, so they went out and rounded up the top scientists and paid them. They brought them all into one site under their ScienceBlogs flagship and there you go, you have that critical mass. You have all these science bloggers, you have all the people that were following them, and here they are all at one site, centralized. That’s the way to do it, because then you don’t have to do all the hard work in the beginning to get people to go to your site, you don’t have to waste thousands of dollars to advertise your site. The content producer has pretty much done all the hard work, they bring the blog readers to your site, and then there they are, ready to look at related bloggers and related stories.

Q: Are there other science social networks on the web?

A: There is a bunch, like more than 10 science social networks on the internet. I was one of the first ones, and around that same time Nature Publishing Group had a science social network, which is a little more like ScienceBlogs, where it is more of a blogging network than it is and actual social network for scientists. But now you’ve got places like SciLinks, ScientistConnection, ResearchGate, and god knows what.

It seems like a lot of people jumped on the “me too” bandwagon of Facebook, and I’m not going to say I didn’t do the same thing, but it seems like right around 2007-2008 these kind of sites started springing up all over the place. And they are all ghost-towns, there’s very little interaction. The best one is probably ResearchGate, but it’s mostly European researchers, or researchers in under-funded countries, so they talk about how to get a hold of certain publications or materials because they don’t have the resources that American researchers do. So going back to “why wouldn’t a social scince network work?” is that in the big power countries that are involved in scientific research, like the US, the whole point of the university system is to bring in a whole group of people on your campus that do the same thing. And the resources are right down the hall, you can talk to the expert face-to-face. The incentive to get online isn’t that great because you have the real person right down the hall that is the expert and is publishing on that. It’s kind of like, “why go online when I can just walk down the hall?”

Q: What is your day-to-day schedule like with LabSpaces?

A: When I first made the website I spend a crapload of time on there looking for science links and copying and pasting press releases by hand, and then after awhile I realized that spending three hours in the morning and three hours at night wasn’t doing me any good. So I actually programmed my own ScreenScraper script to go through a couple of the press release sources that I use, so all I had to do was type in the URL and it would take in all the data I wanted, and automatically download all the pictures and all the content. So it went from spending three minutes on each press release to about one minute. So now, I wake up at about six o’clock in the morning and spend an hour checking over the press releases that have accumulated while I’m sleeping overnight, put those on the site. Then at lunchtime I’ll spend 30-45 minutes going over press releases, and then at night I’ll spend about another hour. Throughout the day I am on Twitter about every half hour. And that’s where I do most of my interacting, I think that’s a better way to do it because it didn’t seem to be happening on the site the way I wanted it to.