Something wicked this way comes.

I said I'd do it so here it is: the article I just finalized for the Oxford University Biochemical Society's termly magazine Phenotype. The editors were oddly professional, I was rather impressed. You should eventually be able to see this article along with its friends here in the Hilary 2010 issue. There was a lot of other stuff I wanted to talk about like open access journals and the use of blogs etc at conferences, but I was given a word limit, so what can you do?

Five years ago, when graduate student Alice Pawley started her blog ( http://scienceblogs.com/sciencewoman/ ) about being a woman in science, finding a community to share her experiences with was not easy. It took weeks, she wrote, to find even one blogger in a similar situation. Now she is an assistant professor and last December she posted that she would soon stop blogging, bidding farewell to a now large blogging community that continues to expand. While the number of people who have taken their personal and professional lives to the internet is staggering, what is more relevant is the growing number of tools we have to organise this information for ourselves, maximising the information we can gather from the internet while minimising the time we spend on it. Although it may be hard for some to admit, it seems that in the last few years the internet has become increasingly useful.

As young scholars of biochemistry, we are in a privileged position to take advantage of these tools, and to incorporate them into our routine. Our peer-to-peer networks are becoming increasingly web-based, top tier scientists share their interests openly via easily accessible sites and high impact journals are beginning to grasp the power of new technologies. This means that having even a loose handle on these newer methods of communication can make all the difference.

The fact is we are now much more likely to spend our time browsing the internet than we are a library. Unlike a library, however, we are each charged with the task of designing our own personalised Dewey Decimal system to organise our resources. Some will keep it simple and stick to getting e-mails or RSS feeds of a PubMed search, an almost effortless way to be kept up-to-date on topics of interest. Others might go a little further and listen to Science or Nature’s weekly podcasts. Those who are already acquainted with Twitter may feel most comfortable following a few of their favorite scientists, @Naturenews or @AdamRutherford, a Nature editor who gave a talk in November 2009 to the Oxford Biological Society. Those with a penchant for blogging, and perhaps a little too much time on their hands, may start delving into the enormous scientific blogosphere from which websites such as http://scienceblogs.com/ and http://www.postgenomic.com/ try to provide highlights. Others might try to collect all this information to view at a glance on their Google Reader and iGoogle homepage. However you go about it, it now seems like almost everyone is finding a preferred way to organise their internet resources.

Of the many questions we could ask of these new tools and their application to our lives, one stands above the rest: is all this really going to increase our productivity and make us better scientists? A particularly compelling story I found was of the blog of Fields Medal recipient Professor Timothy Gower of Cambridge University. Through his blog, a collaborative community was formed that within six weeks came up with a new proof to a long-standing mathematical problem. Having been fruitful in their experiment to bring expertise together through the internet, they are now trying their luck with a new format: a Wiki. While it is still unclear if biomedical science can benefit in the same ways as the mathematical community, there is certainly scientific potential in this new connectivity, however you choose to harness it. •