The chemlambda collection is a social hack, here’s why | chorasimilarity

"People from data deprived places turn to available sources for scientific information. They have the impression that Social Media may be useful for this. Reality is that it is not, by design.

But we can socially hack the Social Media for the benefit of Open Science.

Social Media is not fit for Open Science by design. They are Big Data gatherers, therefore they are interested not in the content per se, but in the metadata. The huge quantity of metadata they suck from the users tells them about the instantaneous interests and social links or preferences. That is why cat pics are everywhere: the awww moment is data poor but metadata rich.

Open Science has as aim to share scientific data and rigorous validation means. For free! Therefore Open Science is data rich. It is also, by design, metadata poor, because at least if a piece of research is not yet popular, there is not much interaction (useful for example to advertisers or to tech companies or govenrnments) to be encoded in metadata...."