Sorry, but I disagree with that assessment. It won’t work for MD so well for multiple reasons:
- answering questions in public forums related to software is usually left to the developers of that software and now there is the problem that beginners mix up questions about the methodology with questions about the software and thus people like me are expected to become adviser to lots of people. That cannot work unless I would stop developing and even then the numbers would be stacked against me.
- Since advising is time consuming and research is extremely competitive, it leads to very few people that should be sharing their knowledge (e.g. all of those that had been helped by a developer in a similar situation) to do so. On one hand this is understandable behavior, but on the other hand, this is rather unsocial, and also a missed opportunity: there is no better way to improve one’s understanding of something than helping somebody else that is a beginner. That is why I am still responding since it keeps my understanding “alive” and sometimes even improves it, even though I am not doing research on my own anymore (no time left for it).
- Doing good(!) MD simulations is much more a craft than a science. There are lots of best practices and conventions and commonly used practices that are far too many to explain them over the internet or write them into text books etc. In many cases those are specific of the area of research and not at all specific to the software in use. Add to that, that there is a very large pool of knowledge in the published literature, too large to digest and process this on your own (MD simulations on computers go back over 50 years!), but also without that kind of knowledge you are bound to repeat all the mistakes and errors that in some cases took people years or even decades to figure out. Thus the most effective way to enter the MD simulation field - like in other crafts - is through some kind of apprenticeship. In the pre-internet times, that was the common procedure: to learn how to do MD simulations one would join a group that had the tools and residual knowledge (either as a visitor or as a student/postdoc) do some collaborative research and then move on (and perhaps learn additional skills from another research groups like a “journeyman” in the crafts).
Bottom line, you will be able to do some level of calculations with the guidance you can (technically) get through forums and emails, and they may be acceptable for publication in less discriminating journals, but without proper guidance and tutoring, you are doomed to become at best some kind of “expert beginner” because you are cut off from the pool of residual knowledge that is vital for doing competitive research in this field. You have to realize that a simulation that runs to the end without warnings or error may still be completely bogus and useless. Comparing to the “craftsman” example, this is like being, say, a plumber that knows how to use all the required tools and still creating a mess by using the wrong materials, making the wrong connections and laying pipe where they shouldn’t be (e.g. where they can easily freeze in winter).