2collab

» see 2collab.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In the spring of 2011 two social bookmarking sites for scientists shut down inside five weeks of each other. Connotea, which belonged to the publisher Nature, retired on 12 March. 2collab, which belonged to the publisher Elsevier, closed on 15 April. The same idea, run by two of the biggest names in academic publishing, gave up at almost exactly the same moment, and that coincidence is the most interesting thing about either of them.

2collab launched in November 2007. It was delicious for researchers, built by the teams behind ScienceDirect and Scopus, free and aimed at the science and medical world. You saved papers instead of blog posts. It kept the bibliographic details attached to the link, so a saved reference could become a citation later, and it let you form groups to share reading with a lab or a field.

On paper it was the obvious thing for Elsevier to build. It already owned the two databases most researchers lived inside, so a bookmarking layer on top would keep them there and show everyone what was being read. The integration was the whole pitch. Find a paper on ScienceDirect and save it to 2collab in one click, with the bibliographic details carried across.

This was never going to reach me, and the reason is specific. 2collab was for the person who writes the papers, and it lived inside journals you needed an institution to open. i read papers as a student and later as an engineer, but i read them the way most people outside a wealthy university do, which is however i could get hold of the pdf, not through a paid ScienceDirect seat with a save button built into it. The tool assumed a subscription i was on the wrong side of. A bookmark is only worth keeping if you can reach the thing again, and half the web it pointed at sat behind a paywall.

~ the chronicle ~

~ wired into the journals ~

What separated it from ordinary delicious was the plumbing. A DOI resolved to a real record, and an export button pushed a reference straight into the citation manager on your desktop. Every tag and every user carried its own feed. It was competent enough. that was never the problem. The problem was that the researchers it was built for already had tools they trusted for the same job, and did not much want a social layer, handed to them by their own publisher, sitting on top of what they read.

~ the spring the category died ~

Academic social bookmarking was a real hope for a few years around 2008. The pitch was that if scientists tagged and shared what they read, you could watch a whole field think in real time. It did not hold. CiteULike lasted longer and died too. Mendeley, the one that actually worked, sold to Elsevier in 2013, which was two years after Elsevier had switched its own version off, and that tells you where the value turned out to sit. The reading did move to a network in the end. The network was Twitter, and later it was Sci-Hub, and neither of those asked a publisher's permission first.

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