We are fans of Alan Marnett and the team at BenchFly.com and have been following their work for a few years now. It was high time that we spotlighted their community, instructional videos and shared their mission with you all. OK, lets hear about BenchFly from Alan himself.

LabGrab - When was Benchfly.com started, and who is its target audience?

Although we officially launched BenchFly in late 2009, we were actively working on it for some time before that. When we first started developing the site I was still a postdoc so progress was slowed by that whole "day-job" thing, which as a postdoc often ends up being more like a "day, night, and weekend-job" thing. But everything came together eventually and we were off and running.

I was really lucky to work with a fantastic postdoc when I was an undergrad and his support had a profound impact on my early years at the bench. As I pursued my own path in research, I always tried to spend as much time as I could training younger scientists since I remember how important that instruction was to me. As web technologies (streaming video, high-speed internet access, etc.) expanded, so too did the opportunity to use them to train and support a larger number of scientists. So our core audience is made up of researchers at the bench including undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs. Most of our video protocols and articles address techniques and issues facing this audience. However, we've been very fortunate to have the support of scientists further along in their careers, which has really helped add some perspective to the discussions.

LabGrab - In the vein of inspiration behind the site, what kind of content do you ideally want to create and what challenges have you faced?

Research is hard for a number of reasons. Talk to ten people at the bench and you will probably get ten different reasons why they're completely stressed out - some personal, some professional. As a result, we've tried to gear the content on the site to both aspects of bench life. Users have the ability to share tips, tricks and techniques through videos or articles covering a range of topics from experimental techniques to delicious recipes. If it affects a scientist's life, we're talking about it.

We make a real effort to share content that is not only useful but also entertaining. So it's been fun to see users post non-traditional videos that provide great information but inject a healthy dose of creativity. Two of my favorites are CAM staining TLC plates and How to Remove Static from a Scale - not your typical protocols, but they show that effectively teaching science doesn't have to be a snooze fest.

Just like working on a project at the bench, we're always dealing with challenges in some form or fashion. However, there are two challenges we face consistently - the first of which is getting the word out about BenchFly. We work on an extremely tight budget (read as "I still eat Raman. A LOT."...), so there's not a proper marketing budget that allows us to go shout about BenchFly from the rooftops. So we've taken to literally shouting from the rooftops, which is probably wearing thin on our neighbors... It's been great to see the growth of the site and I'm always incredibly thankful for people - like the awesome guys at LabGrab - who help spread the word.

The second challenge is more personal and that's learning to have patience. I've got a lot of ideas - some crazier than others - in the vision of where I see BenchFly going. Yet, as Bill Murray said in What About Bob, we've got to take "baby steps" to get there. So I'm taking his advice.

Actually there is one more challenge we struggle with - trying to understand why Jersey Shore is still on tv - but that's a discussion for another day...

LabGrab - It seems like online science resources are plentiful, but many still have a paid content model, and university information tends to be very fragmented. What is your view of this and how does that impact BenchFly.com?

You're right - the internet is certainly full of science resources of various types and many of them work off of subscription models. I think having more resources is great- if they help scientists- I'm for them. However, in Our Mission we've taken a hard line against making the content on BenchFly available through subscription model. To be clear, running a website takes money and without it, the website will disappear. But our feeling is that we shouldn't be biasing access to the information based on whether a scientist's lab or university can afford to pay us. We've challenged ourselves to do better - to come up with a way to provide the resource in a way that keeps it free to scientists, while still being able to cover our costs. This is certainly not an easy route, but we feel passionately about keeping BenchFly an open access resource. We have a couple of very exciting announcements that will come out in the next couple of months that are helping us achieve our goal - so stay tuned!
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So there you have it. Makes you want to learn even more about http://www.benchfly.com right? Special thanks to Alan!