2collab
Encyclopedia
2collab was a scientific social network by Elsevier
Elsevier
Elsevier is a publishing company which publishes medical and scientific literature. It is a part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in Amsterdam, the company has operations in the United Kingdom, USA and elsewhere....
, launched in 2007 and discontinued on 15 April 2011.
2collab was an online collaborative research tool that enabled researchers to share bookmarks, references or any linked materials with their peers and colleagues. Users could share, collaborate and discuss resources either in private groups or openly with the wider scientific community
Scientific community
The scientific community consists of the total body of scientists, its relationships and interactions. It is normally divided into "sub-communities" each working on a particular field within science. Objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method...
. Through the integration of 2collab into other scientific platforms such as ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is one of the largest online collections of published scientific research in the world. It is operated by the publisher Elsevier and contains nearly 10 million articles from over 2,500 journals and over 6,000 e-books, reference works, book series and handbooks issued by Elsevier...
and Scopus
Scopus
Scopus, officially named SciVerse Scopus, is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly 18,000 titles from over 5,000 international publishers, including coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical,...
researchers were enabled to transport not only the bookmark but also the bibliographic data of research papers into their accounts. Especially when they were the author of these bookmarked documents they could create an easy-to-use list and share it with others in their field of expertise and start a conversation.
Users could organize the wide breadth of information online by choosing tags
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
that turn the vast amount of information into navigational structure that is called a folksonomy
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
also known as user generated content.