Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
by Adam Bly
Opening Keynote, May 28, 2009 - this is live blogged, basically notes on what he said... analysis to follow.
Where the world is today,
where science is, at a high level.. Need to solve problems using a
systems approach. Study of epidemics requires understanding
of climate change, need to study growth, need to study demographics and
the future of society, etc.
These are tough times, need science more than ever, but they are optimistic times because what we know and what we can know.
Exciting things happening high energy physics, telescopes, .. oops, mentioned Ida as a possible missing link, guess he doesn't read Laelaps!
Science is culture, and we stand at the beginning of a new renaissance of science, it's methods, its basis in empiricism. It can become the primary lens through which we govern and we know the world. Science is being used to plan cities, it's being used to establish rights for apes in Spain (?!?), ... science is critical to...
These are tough times, need science more than ever, but they are optimistic times because what we know and what we can know.
Exciting things happening high energy physics, telescopes, .. oops, mentioned Ida as a possible missing link, guess he doesn't read Laelaps!
Science is culture, and we stand at the beginning of a new renaissance of science, it's methods, its basis in empiricism. It can become the primary lens through which we govern and we know the world. Science is being used to plan cities, it's being used to establish rights for apes in Spain (?!?), ... science is critical to...
[Ok, I love science, but seriously, there has been "scientific" city planning for decades if not centuries, it's just the metaphor to metabolic pathways or networks that is new. What about ww2 and post ww2 operations research stuff, too, eh? ]
knowledge is good, asking
questions is good, where changing your mind based on new evidence -
formerly called flip-flopping - is a virtue.
[hallelujah!]Massive change, we need to
understand scientists, how they work, how
they view their workflows, how they view the future. They did a state
of science survey (Seed State of Science Report). A heterogeneous
sample, for sure, but we can say a few things:
- science is not a closed system (not Snow's 2 Cultures), it is porous, interacting with art, and ways of new knowledge outside of scientific methods (65% cited literature as having an influence on their science, 73% of scientist say world affairs impact, 63% say politics do), science is fundamentally a human endeavor
- global collaboration is fundamental, 62% of scientists are involved in at least one international collaboration, articles co-authored by authors from multiple countries from 8% to 22% of total
- peer review still matters, 77% agree
- scientists care, 80% feel obliged to do work that benefits humanity [others are mathematicians - just kidding!], 61% feel obliged to speak with journalists about their work (COOL!), 74% feel obliged talk to policymakers. Demographic shifts, more science graduates, bigger portion of the work force, more women than men in the under 30 group
- born digital have come of age (tons of info) 84% of scientists believe that their papers should be freely available to other scientists and the public,. International collaborations are growing - they need better collaboration tools. Scientists are streaming live data. Scientists are using blogs (ooh, stat please? quote from Mr.Gunn - cool!) here it is 34% of scientists use blogs. but the web is broken for finding research. It's fragmented its designed to the same way commercial sites are designed (quote from Wilbanks). It's like duct tape on a new spectrometer (picture).
- globalization - more than just new markets to sell our stuff, more scientists from China than other parts of the world, do we not think culture will change? research ethics? culture of these countries will change how science is done. Scienceblogs in br is bigger than Scienceblogs de
- we have been here before - our industry has been here to catalyze change, like in industrial revolution, science publishing flourished and was critical for the advancement of scientific knowledge, science is a cumulative enterprise, communication is vital... dissemination of accurate science is vital to policymakers. (history of scholarly journals - from letters, Oldenburg, etc.)
Wrapping up - fix
discovery (my rephrase), fix international collaboration - make easier,
not for incremental change but for massive change,
reboot stm for the 21st c
- need digital core (not just tools), for knowledge
- need common standards, increase crowd-sourced innovation, help these so they can be integrated to provide meaningful value to science
- free flow of information (today, it's designed to limit use), can't artificially limit science, science can't afford that
- advance interdisciplinary science, restructure societies
- connect developed to developing world
- (for librarians) - we need to do better extracting knowledge from data (he then showed a lot of visualizations) We don't want to become complacent, and essentialized data, when we need to go deeper. Librarians and Information Scientists need to help us learn how to deal with this data. Can visualization be a new language so that biochemists and physicists can both intuitively understand what's going on
- bring scientists together and together with resources, so when we bring scientists together, it's with what they need to do science including resources and with free flowing communication
- lead the social change toward universal science literacy.
- "they're not our readers" - very little brand loyalty, scientists and scholars seek truth, need to collaborate
(totally random brainstorm
- what if libraries could take a picture of some scientists
bookshelf/desktop, feed that into a system which will extract book
names, check the open url resolver/catalog for them ,and then output a
digital bookshelf with the same titles....seriously, that's not that
far away, wouldn't that be cool?)
New projects, new announcements
New projects, new announcements
- letters in 1666 > blogs today (34% of scientists) - but these are distributed all over the blogosphere, how can scientists find what they need to read? ResearchBlogging.org - today 2nd release
- free service to publishers - new application to allow publishers and societies to reintroduce these research posts back to the journals - first two publishers PLOSone and The Royal Society (the first journal) "researchblogging connect"
- researchblogging linking to data
- researchblogging working with CrossRef
- new information science channel
- working with GE, using large datasets - health information - (something like healthy imagination.com?)
- will be introducing new software to help collaboration in science
We cannot be the
impediment to discovery, scientists need us, the world needs scientists
(maybe not exact, but close to what he said)
[WRT fixing discovery, my place of work is working on various aspects
of this, but it is very hard. I'll blog soon about "the
discovery layer" and some ideas]
Comments
"oops, mentioned Ida as a possible missing link, guess he doesn't read Laelaps!"
I guess not! I just can't compete with the media machine, try as I might. ;)
Posted by: Laelaps | May 28, 2009 11:01 AM
"they're not our readers" - very little brand loyalty
Except when it comes to journals. I think there's a cultural difference here, I get the sense that phys scientists and engineers are less likely to rely on journal names (viz reputations) to choose their reading.
Posted by: bill | May 28, 2009 1:21 PM
Just to clarify, I don't think the 34% of scientists are using blogs number came from me http://friendfeed.com/search?q=34%25+from%3Amrgunn but I'd love to know what quote he did use.
I do have some very rough data on that, though. From the 80+ people we polled in the San Diego area, though, including scientists and people working in other roles for biotech companies, 28% reported they visit science blogs once a week or more. >70% reported familiarity with Facebook and LinkedIn.
We're getting there!
Posted by: Mr. Gunn | May 28, 2009 4:35 PM
Someone can correct me - but I believe the stats were part of his listing of information from Seed's State of Science report which resulted from a massive international survey.
Posted by: Christina Pikas | May 28, 2009 4:38 PM