Scitable offers free, online learning space to encourage science students

30% of science students drop out of their science program after their first year in college. It's the worst possible time to have a dearth of scientists--and Scitable is one solution.

Climate change, sustainable food and housing, alternative energy, environmentalism, diseases--these are all problems that can only be solved by scientists. Yet the popularity of the study of hard science is low and getting lower.

Scitable is one solution, and an interesting one. It doesn't take a PR approach to encouraging science study, with a hip advertising campaign or a rebranding. It simply makes it easier and more efficient for anyone who's interested to learn more about hard science from the experts.

Scitable offers a library of free science textbooks and a sort of social network of online experts where students and interested parties can discuss and learn about science. Scitable is also working to have their system placed in classrooms around the world.

The network and textbooks are exclusively available in English, for now; Wired calls English the unofficial language of science, and notes that most high school graduates around the world have at least some English. But Spanish, French, and Mandarin support is coming soon.

There are some interesting crowdsourcing ideas at work as well. Scitable is a program started by Nature Publishing Group, which uses peer review to verify their reports. Any user can suggest changes, but those also have to be reviewed--it's not Wikipedia, and Nature wants everything to be as accurate as possible.

At the moment, the program only offers articles in the field of genetics, but they've announced that other areas of life science, including cell biology and ecology, will be following soon.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com