BiomedExperts.com - Your Scientific Matchpoint

BiomedExperts.com is a doctors and life scientists’ social network funded by Dell and Collexis, which aims to gather information and resources on the biomedical scene to allow the experts of the field to benefit from the communication goodies of social networking: instant messaging, extended profiling, meeting people who are researching areas that relate to your study field, hopefully minus the glitter and animated gifs. The service is free and can be joined by individuals, research institutions and government institutions as well. Presently the network gathers profiles of about 1.4 million biomedical experts from more than 150 countries which have been created based on research papers indexed in PubMed over the last 10 years. Of these people, some are active and some don’t, but in any case, inactive members’ profiles work like short wikis that provide standard contact details. Interestingly, users who don’t have published works can also join BiomedExperts.com but can’t generate a profile or their own (they can associate themselves with institutions they are related to, like workplaces or universities).

“Bringing the right researches together and allowing them to grow their professional network is the ultimate goal of BiomedExperts (BME) - the first literature-based social networking platform, Collexis is providing BME free of charge for all researchers around the globe in an effort to increase collaborative biomedical research for the collective good”.

BiomedExperts.com is a great idea, especially for large research projects that need to have several study-groups under different conditions for them to meet and join efforts, and also a way to establish solid networks between the most authoritative experts in biomedical sciences from across the world. This aspect of bonding is always hard for third-world scientists, who frequently find it hard to attend reunions and symposiums around the world on a regular basis.

BiomedExperts.com indicates it is the first literature-based social networking platform, but there seems to be no literature-in-itself resources available from the site. As per can be read in the site’s FAQs there is a project to develop a paper and preliminary research results exchange area, where work-in-progress can be seen linked to members’ profiles, but since most of scientific research projects are funded by institutions or pharmaceutical industries that hold the copyright for that material, it seems unlikely that it will effectively work. Will they beat the odds? Will they develop an alternative way to cope with the need for updated research abstracts?