Eight months into the existence of “Drug Repurposing – Reprofiling – Repositioning,” a little bit of analysis would seem to be in order. An active online community has formed, and its still growing — of course not as much as it did initially, but we still run an average of 15-20 new members per month. January and May 2011 were strongest so far, with 43 and 32 people joining.
Membership is at 232, which is not much as LinkedIn science and technology groups go nowadays: Systems Biology has over 3,000 members, and even Hyperspectral Imaging has more than 1,600. But then, our group has been around only since December 2010. In any case what counts is the professional quality of the people here – and that they are using this group for discussing matters related to the subject…. which they do: 25 of our members started a total of 62 threads and 16 more participated in the ensuing discussion. Of these 62 initial postings, 48 evolved into discussions (meaning that they drew at least one comment). In other words, 18% of our members had active involvement at least once. This is a high percentage for such a group, where you can expect at least 90% lurkers. I am satisfied that my idea of founding this group has taken so much hold.
To put this in relation, look at what The Linus Group, a marketing consulting firm focused on creating demand for scientific products and services, found out when they recently analyzed community dynamics of LinkedIn scientific discussion groups. The table published there summarizes posting profiles, showing that each of the groups listed there had less than one percent of users making multiple posts during the past two months, and that the fraction of those who respond to group posts by either commenting or clicking “Like” is in the single-digit percentage range for all groups. At least 90 percent of all group members made no contribution at all during the past two months. In large groups, this figure was be more like 99%, which corresponds to what is known about online communities. You can’t compare these figures with ours directly because Linus had looked only at the two most recent months (instead of 8, as we did here). Also, each group was larger than ours. But there is no doubt that our group compares well in terms of activity parameters.
People doing bioinformatics, or with a background in it, are the single largest segment – nothing has changed here – but very few take part in our group’s discussions. Are they only looking for ideas here, and discuss the specifics in the focused bioinformatics groups, of which LinkedIn has several? Perhaps. There are clear limits to what can be discussed in such a group; in the end, most of us have intellectual property interests to consider in one way or the other. Even so, I believe there is much potential which we have hardly addressed: applications of cheminformatics, drug reformulation issues, and patenting are subjects that are rarely raised in our discussions. Lets make this group even more interdisciplinary! – And then of course, there is the small matter of financing drug repurposing efforts, in times where investors scramble to buy gold and Swiss Francs, and budgets are cut…