OPINION ARTICLE published: 15 December 2014 doi: 10.3389/fgene.2014.00430 A lesson from the ice bucket challenge: using social networks to publicize science

Hashem Koohy 1* and Behrad Koohy 2

1 Functional Genomics Group, Babraham Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 2 King Edward VI School, Warwickshire, UK *Correspondence: [email protected]

Edited by: John Hancock, University of Cambridge, UK Reviewed by: Mick Watson, The Roslin Institute, UK

Keywords: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, social network, Twitter, ice bucket challenge, ResearchGate, Mendeley, CiteULike

1. BACKGROUND Mendeley, CiteULike and so on, which and maintenance for that weekend. Similar Scientists are financially dependent have gained some popularity among aca- usageofTwitterwasthenfollowedupin on the general public. Salaries and demics and other specific disciplines. the Arab Springs and in the 2011 London research expenses come (directly or For example, LinkedIn targets prospec- Riots. indirectly) from taxpayers. The pub- tive employers and jobseekers in different lic’s understanding and appreciation of fields.Thesecondtypehowever,hasno 4. PUBLICIZING SCIENCE WITH SNS research is a motivational force for sci- specialized theme as such and has gained a During the past three months, two entists. This is possibly one reason that universal popularity. Twitter and Facebook unplanned events initiated a great wave scientists like their work to be cov- can be considered as the two key represen- in SNs, giving rise to millions of pounds ered by the media. However, scientists tatives of this group. Based on specialized to be donated to cancer and ALS chari- have shown very little success in more theme of SNs in the first group, it is not ties (see below). Without any doubt, they directly communicating with the pub- surprising if we see scholars are biased both increased the public awareness about lic about their findings. Despite the fact towardthefirstgroup.However,forpub- these two—yet to be cured—diseases. that scientists have been very successful licizing science, scientists should also care The amount of money raised and the in solving many seemingly unsolvable about the group in which the majority of level of public awareness achieved for problems, (Fermat Last Theorem, step- the account holders are non-scientists. these two diseases were simply more ping onto the moon, sequencing genomes Assuch,inwhatfollows,wefocuson than what the scientists had achieved for many species, unraveling the com- the latter type of SNs, mainly Twitter, and over many years. The first which ini- plexity of different types of cancers, first, try to illustrate their effectiveness and tiated on Facebook, was about teenage discovering the importance and appli- efficiency in communicating key issues to cancer and started when Steven Sutton cations of the stem cells, to name a few), the public and then suggest a few ways puthisstoryonFacebookandcalledfor they have shown little success in telling of using Twitter with the ultimate aim of aid. The second was called Ice Bucket the public about the value and signif- reducing the gap between scientists and Challenge (IBC), and its ultimate aim was icance of these achievements nor have the public. to combat Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis they made the public aware about existing (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative challenges, leaving a big gap between sci- 3. IMPACT OF SNS ON OUR LIVES disease with 15 newly diagnosed patients entific communities and the public. Given SNs, in particular Twitter, have proven to per day. The life expectancy of diagnosed the ever-increasing popularity of social- be very powerful tools in changing politi- patients ranges between two to five years. network-based communications, scientists cal equations, social movements, market- However, thanks to the IBC, the public should ask themselves if they could use the ing, business and permeate almost every now knows more about this disease than potential of public Social Networks (SNs) part of our daily routines. One of the first ever before. In what follows, we aim to for reducing this gap? instances we began to realize the power of focus on ALS and IBC from a Twitter per- Twitter was during the Green Movement spective, and illustrate the role of Twitter 2. SOCIAL NETWORKS AND Protests in Iran against the questionable in directing the public attention to ALS. SCIENTISTS presidential election in 2009. In a coun- Although the origin of the IBC is not SNs can be broadly divided into two try with little Internet access the impact of very clear, in particular, with the presence types based on their applications: one using it was high enough to force author- of a similar activity called “Cold Water type has a more specialized theme and ities to react. Iranian authorities ordered Challenge,” it gained enormous popular- aims for networking among special- it to be banned (its usage is still limited). ity in SNs during July and August 2014 ists and focused communications. This The American Secretary of State, on the when millions of people took part in this group includes LinkedIn, ResearchGate, other hand, ordered their extra support activity.

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The participants included people from The huge success of the IBC has already They are worried about unsecured status various backgrounds, ranging from high attracted some attention from different of these SNs, in particular, about revealing profile celebrities and politicians, to peo- disciplines (Boko, 2014; Tucker, 2014)and the details of their private life and unpub- ple from the poorest regions of the globe surely will be the topic of more sophisti- lished scientific work, (c) They are worried with limited access to internet and SNs. cated studies in the future. Nevertheless, it about being bombarded with noise-like The initial idea of the IBC was to pour provides an example in which the power feeds. cold water on one’s head with the aim of SNs was enhanced by clearly defining a We agree that these problems and risks of raising money for charities working on task in a simple yet fun way, with a valu- are likely for the twitter users. However, (a) ALS-related subjects. Besides raising an able incentive, promoting a good feeling We hope that our example illustrates the incredible amount of funds (US $98.2m, amongst participants. In addition, the task functionality of Twitter for scientific com- from the beginning to 29 of August 2014, almost exponentially spread across SNs, munications, (b) There are a few actions which is 35 times more than the same since each participant had to challenge two that can be taken to increase the security of period in last year) IBC has remarkably new people to take part. your account. In particular the beginners helped prompt the public awareness about We agree that this level of success in are recommended to follow the twitter oneoftheTwentyfirstcentury’schallenges using SNs for a particular task is not security and safety guidelines (see Twitter, in science. To further illustrate this, we easy to achieve. Nevertheless, an increased 2014) (c) By choosing your followers and have compared the daily number of tweets usage of SNs is a key step in engaging yourfollowings,infact,youaredirecting of #icebucketchallenge vs. #ALS during public awareness. the kind of discussions you would like to August 2014. We have also considered the It is hard to obtain an accurate mea- take part than can prevent - at least to daily number of #MS (Multiple Sclerosis) sure of the fraction of scientists actively some extent- from being bombarded by tweets as a control. Results are shown using Twitter, but it is estimated to be unwanted tweets. in Figure 1, which shows how Twitter- only 2.5% (Priem, 2011; Darling et al., Once you have started your virtual based discussion about IBC and ALS are 2013). We therefore recommend the non- socialization, based on your interests, related. users, in particular, those who are hesitant, which are reflected in your feeds, posts Interestingly, during the third week of to pay more attention to the power of and connections, you are likely to be fol- the August, when millions of people were these SNs. It is worth noting that SNs are lowed by a limited number of your science tweeting about IBC, hundreds of thou- advancing very quickly, in 5 years time it colleagues, science students, journalists, sands of people on a daily basis were tweet- might be harder to join in. Also, there is politicians and so on. However, accord- ing about ALS. This is considerably greater always the possibility that SNs will loose ing to the six degrees of separation rule than the number of people tweeting about their popularity (for some unforeseen rea- (Wikipedia, 2014), your tweet can be read Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a more wide- son) and those who haven’t joined might by any other user (billions for Twitter) spread and known disease to the public. miss the chance to reach others by these in fewer than six re-tweets. This provides Although this figure is based on Twitter’s means. you with a fantastic opportunity to present data, we obtained a very similar pattern We are not aware of any systematic your science. from the Google trends when we com- study on why scientists show less inter- In the remainder of this section we sug- pared the number of searches of IBC vs. est in Twitter and Facebook. However, gest a number of specific things that you “what is ALS?”. More statistics and data based on personal discussions three rea- can start with. about the IBC challenge can be found at sons are frequently mentioned: (a) They As a postgraduate student or a junior Shuck (2014). do not see any point of using it, (b) scientist you can:

FIGURE 1 | Illustrated here is the number of tweets of #ALS, #MS and #Icebucketchallange on a daily basis (y-axis) during August 2014 (x-axis).

Frontiers in Genetics | Bioinformatics and Computational Biology December 2014 | Volume 5 | Article 430 | 2 Koohy and Koohy Fighting ALS with ice bucket

• Live-tweet the scientific conferences not highlight their key messages in plain Darling, E. S., Shiffman, D., Cote, I. M., and Drew, that you attend. This is indeed a good English. J. A. (2013). The role of twitter in the life cycle way of learning more about talks and • Broaden your expertise by discussing of a scientific publication. PeerJ,1,1–31.doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.16v1 posters as you try to tweet their key your science with researchers from Ekins, S., and Perlstein, E. O. (2014). Ten simple rules messages in 140 characters. For a useful other disciplines. of live tweeting at scientific conferences. PLOS guide we refer the reader to Ekins and • Engage directly with the public rather Comput. Biol. 10:e1003789. doi: 10.1371/jour- Perlstein (2014). than having the media distracting your nal.pcbi.1003789 • Discuss recently published papers. This scientific messages. Remember how the Gregory, T. R. (2012). The Encode Media Hype Machine. Available online at: http:// encourages you to understand each incredible amount of work and discov- www.genomicron.evolverzone.com/2012/09/the-en paper thoroughly. You are also very eries in the ENCODE project were dis- code-media-hype-machine/ likely to learn new facts during these tracted by inappropriate presentation of Priem, J. (2011). As Scholars Undertake a Great informal discussions that you may have only one of its scientific messages (see Migration to Online Publishing, Altmetrics Stands overlooked. This eventually helps good Gregory, 2012). to Provide an Academic Measurement of Twitter and • Other Online Activity. Available online at: http:// science to be appreciated and bad Advertise job opportunities in your blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/11/21/ science to be filtered out. group. In particular, young people altmetrics-twitter/ • Connect with the leading figures in your haveshownmoreactiveinSNs,so Shuck, J. (2014). The Data Behind the Ice Bucket . field. This keeps you updated, not only this increases your chance of attract- Challenge. Available online at: http://www plentyconsulting.com/ice-bucket-challenge-data in terms of scientific advances in your ing undergraduate and postgraduate Tucker, C. (2014). Why the Ice Bucket Challenge field, but also of potential suitable jobs candidates. Proved Such a Runaway Success.Available being offered in these groups. online at: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/ • Be interactive. Discuss the challenges 5. CONCLUSIONS why-the-ice-bucket-challenge-proved-such-a-run you face and ask your followers’ pin- SNs are fast developing and becoming away-100262238434.html Twitter, H. C. (2014). Stay Safe and in Control of ions about them. Believe it or not, there extremely popular. They have proven very your Twitter Experience. Available online at: https:// is always someone out there to assist influential and able to change various support.twitter.com/groups/57-safety-security you. Also, do not be shy in expressing aspects of our lives. They can be very Wikipedia. (2014). Six Degrees of Separation — your opinion about other tweets and/or instrumental for the scientific communi- Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Available online questions that are asked. ties for further outreaching and educating at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title= Six_degrees_of_separation&oldid=623070045 • If your are new to the field of compu- the public about our scientific discover- tational biology then it is worth noting ies. The design and popularity of Twitter Conflict of Interest Statement: Therevieweditor that companies like Google, Twitter and has made it a very loud micro blog and, John Hancock declares that, despite being affili- Facebook are pioneers in developing to some extent, unique for further public ated at the same institution as the author Hashem super fast searching models, memory engagement with scientific activities. For Koohy,thereviewprocesswashandledobjectively management, data storage, handling big further discussion about this, please follow and no conflict of interest exists. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the data and visualizations which are also me on Twitter: @hashemkoohy. absence of any commercial or financial relationships some fundamental issues in computa- that could be construed as a potential conflict of tional biology. So being active in tweeter AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS interest. and other SNs might put you in a posi- Hashem Koohy: conceived, designed, ana- tion to think about some of underly- lyzed and wrote, Behrad Koohy: exported Received: 09 October 2014; accepted: 21 November ing machine learning techniques that data, analyzed and wrote. 2014; published online: 15 December 2014. Citation: Koohy H and Koohy B (2014) A lesson from fascinate you. ACKNOWLEDGMENT the ice bucket challenge: using social networks to pub- We highly appreciate Patrick Varga-Weisz, licize science. Front. Genet. 5:430. doi: 10.3389/fgene. 2014.00430 And for the senior scientists, further to Mikhail Spivakov, Paula Freire-Pritchett, This article was submitted to Bioinformatics and what have we suggested for the junior Jonathan Cairns and Joanna Mitchelmore Computational Biology, a section of the journal scientists: for their comments that greatly improved Frontiers in Genetics. the manuscript. An special thanks to Copyright © 2014 Koohy and Koohy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Behnoosh Sabah who invited Hashem Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The • Highlight the importance of your find- Koohy to the ice bucket challenge and ini- use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is ings to the public. tiated the idea of this note. permitted, provided the original author(s) or licen- • Make your science understandable. sor are credited and that the original publication REFERENCES in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted Your papers published in high impact Boko, G. (2014). 6 Viral-Marketing Lessons to Learn academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduc- journals are often far too difficult to from the Ice Bucket Challenge. Available online at: tion is permitted which does not comply with these be appreciated by the majority. So, why http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236843 terms.

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