cpikas | December 17, 2009this continues my stream of consciousness notes from the workshop held in DC, December 16, 2009.
Peter Binfield (PLOS) - article level metrics. Not talking about OA, not talking about journal level. Journal is just packaging, and shouldn't necessarily judge articles by the packaging. PLoS ONE has half a percent to all the publications that appear in PubMed.
Evaluating an article after publication instead of before so article level metrics are of interest. JIF measures the journal and not the article (or the person). Some things that could be used: citations, web usage, expert ratings, social…
cpikas | December 17, 2009Continuing my stream of consciousness notes from this meeting in DC, Wednesday, December 16, 2009.
Jevin D West (U Washington, Eigenfactor) - biology and bibliometrics. biology has a lot of problems that are studied looking at networks. From ecosystems to genomes. They want to take these huge networks and be able to tell stories. The citation network is a model for information flow that they can then use in biology. WoS 8k journals, 15 years, 60M citations. Goals of eigenfactor: develop tools to comprehend large networks in all areas of science - employ these tools to understand scholarly…
cpikas | December 17, 2009I attended this one-day workshop in DC on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. These are stream of consciousness notes.
Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL) - intro - Lots of metrics: some accepted in some areas and not others, some widely available on platforms in the information industry and others not. How are these metrics selected? Why are some more attractive than others?
Two other points: informal science communication on the web - it's being adopted rapidly - scholars immediately reap the benefits. Lots of metrics: views, downloads, "favorites", followers. So our current metrics are impoverished (…
cpikas | December 10, 2009I've weighed in a few times on how to build online communities or support scientists online, but it's really worth paying attention to when you get an actual scientist who is also very involved in and interested in social software tell you what he thinks. Cameron Neylon did just that in a recent blog post (comments on ff). I'll quote liberally from his blog and feedback some ideas.
(he uses SS4S to stand for social software for science) All of the numbered paragraphs are direct quotes from his post.
1. SS4S will promote engagement with online scientific objects and through this encourage and…
cpikas | December 9, 2009SUMMARY: With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies. This RFI will be active from December 10, 2009 to January 7, 2010. Respondents are invited to respond online via the Public Access Policy Forum at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open, or may submit responses via electronic mail. Responses will be re-posted on the online forum. Instructions and a timetable for…
cpikas | December 6, 2009In "common parlance" we throw around chemistry, biology, physics, and all, sort of throwing off the diversity within these disciplines. Gosh, in my comps I answered (or attempted to answer) a question about how useful it was to talk about "scientists" and non-scientists. Going the other way, I'll frequently discuss "research areas" or "invisible colleges" (Price [a] and of course Crane[b]*) or even some of the other groupings of scientists:
lab/university/organization
social circle [c]
paradigm (Kuhn) [d]
epistemic culture (Knorr Cetina)[e]
thought collective (Fleck)[f]
core set (Collins…
cpikas | December 5, 2009Getting this from Drugmonkey - the first line from the first post of each month this year. Looks like I should pay attention to having snappy first lines!
The first half of the year is all about preparing for my comprehensive exams and the second half of the year is all about recovering from taking them! Let's hope next year brings a dissertation proposal defense and writing, writing, writing.
January: Finished Yin [link]
February: This is 2 weeks, and really quite paltry. [link]
March: I'm now back into re-reading, so notes will be shorter (and I'm hoping to pick up speed). [link]
April:…
cpikas | December 4, 2009In a recent post on openness and sharing in chemistry, I briefly touched on proximity to industry. This is actually somewhat nuanced and a few research studies have looked into it.
As I mentioned Birnholtz, in his dissertation [1] and subsequent JASIST article [2] describes proximity to industry as both/either being funded by a commercial or industrial organization and/or "the extent to which there is an interest by researchers or others in commercializing or otherwise profiting financially from research discoveries" (dissertation, p27). There's the myth that the research university gets all…
cpikas | December 3, 2009ASME- the American Society of Mechanical Engineers - has a series of journals that are heavily used by mechanical, aerospace, and even civil engineers. Most engineering schools have these all the way back. So in the past couple of weeks libraries all over the country have realized that, all of a sudden they don't have access to a decade of the journal 1990-1999. I have no direct experience with this but have been following the discussion and dismay on ASEE's ELD list.
What actually happened is that ASME sold a digital backfile that ended at 1989, they sold current access to the digital…
cpikas | November 28, 2009With well known and respected open science projects coming out of chemistry as well as cool tools like pubchem and emolecules... it seems a bit unfair of me to ask if chemists are grinches. But there has been and there continues to be a lot of study of data/information/knowledge sharing in chemistry - or, really, the lack thereof. In general, pre-prints are not passed around or self-archived, there is very little data sharing (there are counter examples in crystallography), and details are withheld from conference presentations or the conference slides are not made available (Milo used to…
cpikas | November 18, 2009It seems like there was nothing new from the established publishers for a while - nothing with their core business. Some experimented with ways to communicate and most updated content management systems, but it seemed like most weren't touching their standard models. PLOS' experiments met with raised eyebrows and skepticism, but now, looks like others are taking notice and finally starting to experiment in their core business.
I already commented on Nature starting up a quick turnaround journal - ok, new product offerings aren't that exciting except for this is new for Nature.
What seems…
cpikas | November 18, 2009Let me start by quoting an e-mail Dawn Pointer McCleskey sent to the SLA-DC listserv today (I have her permission). This is in reply to an e-mail from a younger member who mentioned how teachers and nurses have reclaimed their place and have formed very active and well-respected communities without giving up their identities. (I paraphrase - unfortunately, the listserv requires you to login to see the thread)
...the younger members of SLA are definitely here, though I wasn't able to make it to the town hall meeting because I was at ASIS&T that week.
Your point about nurses and teachers…
cpikas | November 17, 2009I got back from the SLA conference last June to the whole lab in a crisis. It passed and in e-mail, I got a notice that my SLA renewal was over due. Which is funny because I routed all the paperwork at the same time as my conference registration paperwork (we have an office that processes all of our society memberships). So then I dug, and dug, and dug, and dug... and didn't find that I still had a print/signed copy of my registration renewal form. I found it saved on my hard drive and printed it out and put it on the pile... closed the library down... moved offices... thought about it...
So…
cpikas | November 15, 2009
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/2009/11/sunday-secrets_15.html
via Andrew on FriendFeed.
(don't sue me, I'm just the messenger!)
Even if it isn't true, it's sort of funny and now all I can see is my kitchen sink strainer (not a toilet).
cpikas | November 14, 2009Thursday was a half day covering first the cyberinfrastructure and then some discussions of another system that can provide lessons learned to the RSN (reminder: regional scale nodes, the long cabled sensors).
My notes are (of course) at work, but I'll reconstruct some of what I heard. I would recommend interested folks consult the final design document (oh no! it isn't where I found it the other day).
The CI is pretty complicated - in many places it's closer to the cutting edge of science than other parts of the enterprise. The complications include: openness, interactivity, quantities of…
cpikas | November 11, 2009And now for something completely different :) I am attending the Ocean Observatories Initiative Science Workshop in Baltimore. Today was the first day and there's a half day tomorrow. OOI is big science in its purest form. It's multi-decade, multi-hundred million dollar facility for studying the ocean. In Europe, they have ESONET and in Japan, they have lots of similar projects, but DONET is probably the most similar. Canada has NEPTUNE.
There are several parts to this thing: regional scale nodes (RSN), global scale nodes (GSN), coastal nodes, cyberinfrastructure (CI), and education/public…
cpikas | November 8, 2009How do you balance robust enterprise IT services with computer science as a research area?
This post has been floating around in my head for a while - I even had this started but lost the draft in a tragic overnight OIT loaner laptop reboot. I can't actually answer this question, and trying to has left this draft in my queue for way too long. So this is really some thoughts and more questions.
In a research organization that does CS research, you'll still have an IT department to keep the lights on, so to speak. They run the network, set up new machines, and all of the other typical things. …
cpikas | November 8, 2009There's a nice rebuttal of the Sirsi Dynix anti-open source white paper done by Mark Leggott that just came out (I found it via Jason Griffey). More thoughtful than some.
There are so many misconceptions on both sides of this. First, open source is not free. You do need people to install and maintain it and maybe customize it. Some open source projects have less documentation than others.
On the other hand, what's worse is when you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large software product only to then have to pay more and more and more and more to buy additional modules,…
cpikas | November 3, 2009One of the great things about my interests overlapping computer science is that computer scientists believe in self archiving and making their work freely available on the web. The scientometric parts of IS are that way, too, but the L of the LIS... well, that's just sad (except for Dorothea, her stuff is available). I still hope to write a review of one of these books because I'm really enjoying it. Here are a few:
Hearst, Marti (2009). Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/. Sure there are lots of books on information…
cpikas | November 1, 2009On day three I only made two sessions - and the second was incredibly disappointing (I have serious problems with the study design) so I'll just briefly chat about the first, which was pretty awesome.
Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory (II): Methods for the Study of Cyberinfrastructure (and Other Large Distributed Phenomena)
This is a pretty big project that stretches over maybe about 10 schools. Christine Borgman is a/the lead for it. David Ribes talked about his work with a large hydrology project. It was interesting how the technical support folks had to negotiate the needs of both engineers…