Systems Biology Research Blog

I'm totally convinced that a key of successful cooperation in science is the sharing of information. This issue needs to employ collaborative software to communicate and share data, which I summarised some years ago (see my somewhat outdated poster). A more actual approach to collect and, more important, categorise some of the technologies is done by Romano et al. (2011). I'm aware that the authors have to balance on the border line of mention the most useful tools for bioinformatics and the danger of a messy link archive. I also totally agree that the missing inter-connection between the tools (not just the mentioned networks) is the biggest problem right now. On the other hand, I think the article is not paying enough attention to the exchange of scientific publications. Inside a spatial distributed project group, this may become a distinct issue. In particular I missed a notification of Bibsonomy (Benz et al. 2010), which I presently test.
Among public sharing, the website allows to store publication lists for private or group purposes. It also includes a pretty number of export options, so that collaborators can use them in their desired way. Using the provided JabRef-plugin, the synchronising of local stored publications and the website is simple. But it is noteworthy, that there is still potential for improvements. For example no subgroup-function is implemented and the JabRef-plugin offers only options for private or public visibility, but not for group wide visibility. Presently I use the JSON export function of Bibsonomy in cooperation with JabRef and a render plugin to easily create reference lists for blog posts (later more when the plugin is working like a charm).

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