Hope Leman is a library technical specialist, co-founder of Next Generation Science, a staff writer at AltSearchEngines and the Web administrator of ScanGrants. You can find her on NextBio, FriendFeed and Twitter.

It is 5:10 a.m. I am working on a netbook in a hotel room in San Francisco. I am attending the Web 2.0 Expo and covering it for the blog AltSearchEngines. While I am attending that event, I have been invited to a dinner sponsored by Microsoft Live Search. Yesterday I attended sessions about Web site monitoring and about how to build online social communities.

All of these activities tie into the world of Science 2.0 and Open Science. For example, the presenter on the online social communities asked what we would leave disappointed about if it were not addressed. I immediately shouted out, “FriendFeed!” because the Science 2.0 and Life Scientists rooms of FriendFeed are fascinating venues for those of us interested in how science is being conducted in the age of Web 2.0.

Indeed, it is very difficult to keep track of the many topics that interest people on the periphery of both science and search. I work in a medical library and also spend a great deal of time looking for grants in the health sciences for a site I help on, ScanGrants. I feel driven to do that because of the obvious brilliance abounding in communities like FriendFeed. It is incredibly rewarding to find substantial grants offered by sometimes obscure foundations and post them on ScanGrants, post that info in FriendFeed and in Twitter and hope that the pool of applicants will thereby be enlarged, thereby helping to ensure that the grantor will be able to pick and choose among highly qualified applicants and that a greater number of scientists will learn of the grant that might not otherwise have heard of it.

Now, just think of the relatively new tools and technologies that have enabled just one person to be able to do a little bit to alert quite a few researchers to large amounts of scientific funding. I use various browsers. I use Google and other search engines to find grants. I list them on ScanGrants and render the categories subscribeable by email and RSS via FeedBurner. I publicize what I have done in Twitter and FriendFeed. Those are almost all free and open source and ScanGrants is free and not a hugely expensive proprietary database like Community of Science. And the oldest of these technologies are the browser and the search engine and the Web sites listing the grants I refer ScanGrants users to. This is indeed a revolution in how scientific communication takes place.

I would spend days in the science-related rooms if I could. There is so much for librarians and anyone interested in such topics as Open Access and Open Science to learn there. I have just popped over there and noted that around 16 hours ago an item was posted about new features of the PLoS journals (and the Public Library of Science publishing venture is a an absorbing saga in and of itself):
We read,

“These improvements have significant implications for both authors and readers and will make it considerably easier for users to navigate around articles; to find related articles; and to discover the impact that a paper might be having in the wider academic community.”

What remarkable developments these are. Librarians and publishers have to figure out how function in a world in which scientists are doing the editing, the publishing and the searching. And that is just one development noted in one item one morning on FriendFeed. Anyone who cares about science, medical libraries and scientific publishing should visit those rooms. What is more, I have found my questions answered by the scientists there with the utmost courtesy, patience and skill.

We are living in a period of economic hardship. But there is huge reason for optimism. Amazing things can be done for free these days. Social networking and the various kinds of 2.0 (Web 2.0, Science 2.0, Research 2.0) are accelerating scientific progress to a degree unimaginable even thirty years ago. This is a great time to be alive.

About NextBio

NextBio’s mission is to make the world’s life sciences information universally accessible. Our goal is to empower researchers and clinicians to make new discoveries in science, find new and better cures to diseases, and work more collaboratively. Our enterprise clients include the world’s top commercial and academic institutions, including Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Scripps Research Institute, Regeneron, Burnham Institute for Medical Research, UC Davis, Stanford, Celgene, Genzyme, and many others.

NextBio is a life science search engine that enables researchers and clinicians to access and understand the world’s life sciences information. NextBio is open biology — search across all of the world’s life science information, share data, and collaborate. Our goal is for NextBio users to better understand science, make discoveries, and generate hypotheses as never before.

With NextBio, in just one click you can search through thousands of studies with billions of data points spanning across different experimental platforms, organisms and data types. NextBio also searches across millions of publications to help you find new articles pertaining to your query. NextBio’s search engine makes massive amounts of disparate biological, clinical and chemical data from public and proprietary sources searchable, regardless of data type and origin, and empowers scientists to quickly understand their own experimental results within the context of other research.