Web-savvy scientists gathered at the Science Online London conference in London on 22 August to explore how the Internet is changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Biochemist Cameron Neylon, of the University of Southampton, UK, was one of a few scientists at the conference who have been given pre-release access to Google Wave — an online collaboration and communication tool announced with great fanfare on 27 May. Nature spoke to Neylon about how Google Wave could transform the way that scientists work.
Q. What is Google Wave, and how might scientists use it?
A. It is a communication tool that is essentially e-mail crossed with an instant messenger. You can think of each 'wave' — or e-mail thread — as a flexible document, which allows collaborators to chat and edit the same version in real time. You can also easily drop rich media — such as sound files, charts and videos — into the document. So Google Wave could be used for collaborative authoring, to speed up writing papers and grant applications, for example.
However, it is also possible to create automatic programs that buzz around the document, annotating it in ways that are hidden from the human reader. The automated programs, or 'robots', make it possible to link to related scientific documents; mark up text so that, for example, protein names are automatically linked to a protein database; or pull in data from elsewhere and create live graphs that update as the data change.
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