Gene Wikis
Description
By Jeffrey R. Young:
"Astronomy is just one of many disciplines being reshaped by a data explosion. Bioscientists have found that decoding entire genomes also meant cultural shifts for their profession. Again, persuading professors to take the time to share proved to be a challenge.
A case in point is a project to create a genetic road map using the same wiki platform that supports Wikipedia.
It started under the name of GenMAPP, or Gene Map Annotator and Pathway Profiler. Participation rates were low at first because researchers had little incentive to format their findings and add them to the project. Tenure decisions are made by the number of articles published, not the amount of helpful material placed online. "The academic system is not set up to reward the sharing of the most usable aspects of the data," said Alexander Pico, bioinformatics group leader and software engineer at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease.
In 2007, Mr. Pico, a developer for GenMAPP, and his colleagues added an easy-to-edit Wiki to the project (making it less time-consuming to participate) and allowed researchers to mark their gene pathways as private until they had published their findings in academic journals (alleviating concerns that they would be pre-empting their published research). Since then, participation has grown quickly, in part because more researchers—and even some pharmaceutical companies—are realizing that genetic information is truly useful only when aggregated.
"There's a sort of a call to action in the biology community right now toward sharing data in usable formats and usable ways," says Mr. Pico. But he admits some in the field are still skeptical that sharing will become the norm." (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rise-of-Crowd-Science/65707/)