The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the journal Science and Science Careers, the career development arm of AAAS, have announced the launch of a pair of online social networking sites. These are expected to help scientists and science trainees who hope to translate laboratory research into clinical medicine and to help minority scientists navigate their career paths. The networks have been designed to serve two distinct groups - CTSciNet is a community for people pursuing careers in clinical and translational research, and MySciNet is a network focused on nurturing diversity in the scientific workforce.
Both sites were developed by AAAS along with contributions from several scientific societies and with corporate and foundation funding. CTSciNet was funded by a grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund while MySciNet was sponsored by Genentech and Pfizer.
The new social networks offer free, secure virtual communities for scientists at all career stages. After registering, users can post and respond to questions on career-related, academic, scientific, or social subjects; join virtual groups on specific topics or for specific organizations; read articles on navigating a career path; and pass along articles and hyperlinks from outside resources.
The networks contain features similar to those offered by Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networks. But since it is monitored by Science Careers staff and populated exclusively by scientists, science trainees and science career experts, science professionals are projected to find CTSciNet and MySciNet considerably more focused.
CTSciNet, which stands for Clinical and Translational Science Network, focuses on building a network of scientists and trainees who wish to speed the translation of scientific breakthroughs into real-world therapies. It seeks to cater to scientists from all disciplines with clinical or basic science training. Also welcome are people from other fields, such as business and clinical medicine, who wish to explore the possibilities for turning science into new and potentially profitable new technologies.
MySciNet is a professional network that seeks to connect scientists and students of diverse backgrounds based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, military service, and economic circumstances. Its objectives are similar to those of CTSciNet. It allows members to form communities to discuss education and jobs, research opportunities, and strategies for overcoming obstacles.
The research community is increasingly opting for collaborative initiatives to expand access to data. Earlier this month, representatives of nonprofit project AcaWiki announced the opening of a new semantic-Wiki based website (http://acawiki.org) that allows scholars, students and bloggers to easily post summaries and discuss academic papers online. It enables users to easily post and discuss human-readable summaries of academic papers and literature reviews online. Also, it helps users to share and organise summaries through the use of tags and RSS feeds. Again this month, publisher Springer announced the launch of a free, multidimensional professional networking site, TheNeuroNetwork.com, for those working and studying the brain.
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