Anton and I can't be happier, or more proud, of what this conference achieved. More than anything, we are astounded by the openness with which so many people came together to share, explore, question, listen and narrate in order to reflect the importance of science in their lives and how the Web can be used to share their passions for science. See my post, Making it real: People and Books and Web and Science at ScienceOnline2010 (and please give us your feedback through this form).

Our gratitude goes to all who attended the conference and participated so energetically in the conversations there.

And special thanks goes to the following individuals and organizations that helped us grow and improve this conference. Please thank them for making ScienceOnline2010 possible -- click through to their sites to learn more about each person or organization. (We thanked the sponsors of ScienceOnline'09 here, the second event here and the first event here.):

People

You cannot see the feedback that many participants at ScienceOnline2010 have already provided to Anton and me (keep them coming - we take the responses very seriously), but the recurring theme for the "highlight of the conference" question was "Meeting the People"; and the main request for the future is "provide more time for informal conversations".

You will see even more of that kind of sentiment if you peruse the growing list of blog coverage. Or glean it from photographs posted on Flickr and Picasa here, here, here, here and here. Or on YouTube videos here and here....

John Mckay and I (the resident primate at ScienceBlogs) will be facilitating a discussion on the history of open access and how vital it's been for scientific innovation on Saturday from 3:15 - 4:20 as part of Section C: An Open History of Science. We'll present some of the historical barriers that have stood in the way of what Robert K. Merton called "the ethos of science" and foster discussion on how we can remove those barriers today. For related links on how the history of science can inform today's practice see The Scientific Revolution is Open, The Grassroots of Scientific Revolution, and the four part series on Deconstructing Social Darwinism at The Primate Diaries.

We may be enjoying the pinnacle of the modern scientific revolution here in the West, but the developing world needs these tools most of all. Considering that the greatest issues involving climate, population, pollution and conservation exist in the Global South the dearth of access to subscription journals is of paramount importance. The Directory of Open Access Journals now has more than 4,500 entries and the list is growing every day. This is the future of scientific communication and we're building that future right now.

Many of the citizen science projects that I've been reading about have a common structure. There's a University lab at the top, outreach educators in the middle, and a group of citizens out in the field collecting data.

After the data are collected, they end up in a database somewhere and the University researchers analyze them and write papers. At least that's my impression so far.

It seems to me, that with all kinds of databases out there, on-line, there should be plenty of opportunity for both citizens and student groups to participate in analyzing the data.

But do they?

Cross posted at Discovering Biology in a Digital World
#scio10

I did a quick list in my post a while back, but I revisited the attendee list after it closed and noticed a couple of people that weren't in the first list.

As I said in the earlier post, there's been a good tradition of librarians and library people attending Science Online and this year looks to be no exception. So, here's the updated list. Of course, it's only the people whose names I recognize or who I was able to figure out had a library connection so I may be missing a couple. If I've missed you, let me know and I'll add you.

• Stephanie Willen Brown
  
• John Dupuis
  
• Garrett Eastman
  
• Michael Habib
  
• Sarah Jeong
  
• Molly Keener
  
• Hope Leman
  
• Gary Pattillo
  
• Christina Pikas
  
• Dorothea Salo
  
• Kevin Smith
  
• Bonnie Swoger
  
• KT Vaughn
  
• Josh Wilson

There are also a few library-themed sessions at the conference. It's worth following the links to the wiki description pages as those have a lot more information on what the session will be about and when kinds of questions/issues will be discussed:

Repositories for Fun and Profit - Dorothea Salo (Friday workshop)

Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this repository nonsense? What's a repository, and how is it different from a website? What can a repository do for me? Why should I bother with them? Does anybody use them? What's all this about metadata, anyway? Find out from a real live repository librarian!

Online Reference Managers - John Dupuis and Christina Pikas moderating, with Kevin Emamy, Jason Hoyt, Trevor Owens and Michael Habib (Scopus) in the 'hot seats'.

Description: Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information. A few years ago, the options were limited to expensive proprietary desktop clients or BibTeX for people writing in LaTeX. Now we've got lots of choices, many that are online, support collaboration and information sharing, and that work with the authoring tools you use to write papers. In this session we'll hear from representatives of some of these tools and we'll talk about the features that make them useful. Together we will discuss some tips and tricks, best practices and maybe even get into upcoming features, wish lists and the future of citation management software.

Scientists! What can your librarian do for you? - Stephanie Willen Brown and Dorothea Salo

Description: Find free, scholarly, science stuff on the Internet, via your public or state library, or on the "free Web." Learn tips & tricks for getting full-text science research at all levels, through resources like DOAJ and NC Live (for those with a North Carolina library card; other states often offer free resources to library card holders). Find out about some options for storing science material at your academic institution's Institutional Repository. We will also talk about the broader access to material stored in institutional repositories and elsewhere on the Web.

Demo: Scangrants by Hope Leman

Description: ScanGrants is a free, subscribable (via email or RSS) online listing of grant opportunities, prizes and scholarships in the health and life sciences and community service fields.

I can't wait to get to the conference. I'll be arriving fairly late on Friday night, mostly because my son is coming with me and it just wasn't convenient for us to leave any earlier. I'll be posting summaries and impressions here at cross-posting at the ScienceOnline blog.

(Cross-posted from Confessions of a Science Librarian.)

You can check out the app in iTunes here.

Features include a schedule quick-reference, information about the conference as a whole, and a brief nod to the participating sponsors.

The app is named 'SciOnline10' due to the (visible) naming restrictions on the device. Searching for Science, Online, or ScienceOnline2010 (or the app name, SciOnline10) will find it on the App Store if the link doesn't work for you.

The most recent post, just put up, is this one:

Cross-posted at Discovering Biology in a Digital World.

In an earlier post, I started a list of citizen science projects that allow students to make a contribution. Many commentors are graciously adding to that list and I thank you all! I'm glad to learn there are so many interesting projects and ways for people to get involved. Science is so empowering!

My question today concerns things like outcomes and deliverables. We'd like to assume that good things are coming from citizen science because people are involved, but I don't know if that's really true and being a scientist, I want to avoid over-doing the assumptions.

Does the research from citizen science ever get published?

Last Wednesday, at the University of Washington, I learned about one such study. If you know of others, I'd love to see citations in the comments.

Erin Johnson, Janet Stemwedel, Christina Pikas, Rebecca Skloot, Dorothea Salo, Anne Jefferson, Suzanne Franks, SciCurious, Sandra Porter, Dr.Isis, Katie Thompson, Greta Munger, Dave Munger, Abel PharmBoy, Blake Stacey, Pal MD, Ed Yong, John Dupuis, Brian Switek, Chris Rowan, James Hrynyshyn, David Dobbs, Eric Michael Johnson, Greg Laden, PZ Myers and me.

So, if you are a fan or a groupie of one of us or all of us, and are in the Triangle area of NC this weekend, and would like to come by and say Hi, either contact your favourite blogger directly, or come to one of the evening events that are open to non-registered public.

There will be, at ScienceOnline2010, at least two sessions dedicated to books and book publishing - From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing and Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - as well as several others that will at least mention books as vehicles for distributing scientific information, popularization of science, or science education.

This got me thinking....about ways that the Web is changing the world of the book. I can think of three aspects of this:

And, the forecast is ...

ScienceOnline2010 is starting in three days! If you are not excited yet....well, I think you should be! And perhaps I can help you....with this post.

First, see the complete list of attendees, or, if you want more details about everyone, browse through these introductory posts. It is always good to know more about people you are about to spend two or three days with....

Then, check out the Program to see which session in each time-slot you want to participate in. Go to individual session pages right now and join in the discussions, or ask questions. Start shaping the discussion online before it even starts offline.

This is an Unconference, meant to be highly participatory. The point of the meeting is to have conversations. The sessions' titles are meant to be topics for conversations, not lectures. The session moderators are supposed to keep the room engaged and on topic, not to drone on and on in a lecture. And then, there are all those informal conversations that happen in the hallways, and during additional events, and in the hotel lobby and at the hotel bar.....

What to do if you will not be physically present but want to follow? Graham Steel has some ideas, but there are plenty of ways to follow, and to some extent participate in the meeting.

This is an Unconference also in the sense that it is open. Not just that we allow, we actively encourage participants to cover the meeting online - not just sessions, but everything that happens there. The participants are encouraged to livetweet the meeting, to discuss it in various online places like FriendFeed and Facebook, and to blog about it: either liveblog, or a series of blog posts afterwards, or one big summary post at the end.

So, follow our official Twitter account, follow the #scio10 hashtag on Twitter, and follow the Twitter List that aggregates all the participants. Subscribe to our FriendFeed room and our Facebook event. A lot of coverage will also be found on the Science In The Triangle site and blog.

All (except one) sessions will be recorded and the videos posted on the scienceinthetriangle YouTube channel. You can also search YouTube for the #scio10 hashtag later on.

The sessions in rooms D and E will also be livestreamed on The RTP stream - there are chatrooms on the side: use them to discuss in real time. We will have assigned "room monitors" who will check the chatrooms and, if they see an interesting question or comment, inject them into the real-world conversation in the room.

Likewise, these same sessions (in rooms D and E) will be livestremed into SecondLife on the RTP Island. Again, we will have someone keep an eye on the conversations there and may read out a good question out loud into the room.

We are also encouraging participants to make photographic, audio and video recordings of various events - not just sessions, but hallway conversations and other events. We hope they will interview each other. And then post all those audio and video files online and tag them all with #scio10 hashtag for easy search. We will collect everything from anywhere on the Web with that tag in one place - check the wiki (and our other communication channels) for more information when the meeting starts.

One way to warm up and get excited for the conference is to read some blog and media coverage from the previous years. Check out the collected links of coverage of the 2007 meeting, the 2008 meeting and the 2009 meeting. Of course, the 2010 meeting has already generated quite a lot of coverage (this time in reverse-chronological order) and we expect much more, so try to catch up (and add to it on your own blogs).

Finally, some of the past participants revealed much more about themselves in a series of interviews I conducted with them over the past two years. Many of them will be here again this year/week (marked with an asterisk) so you can see what they had to say about themselves, their science/Web projects, and about the conference itself: - the 2008 interviews and 2009 interviews.

Every year, we pay special attention to sessions that explore the use of the Web in science education. This year is no different - there are several sessions to choose from: