open science
clock | October 24, 2007This is where I will be next:
"Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences"
Friday, November 9, 1:00 - 6:00 pm
TMEC Walter Amphitheater, Harvard Medical School
260 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA 02115
www.harvardpublishingforum.com
This is a student-organized conference that will convene experts from across the world to discuss the state of publishing in the biological sciences.
If you are coming, let us know through Facebook. Or e-mail me and let's get together on that day, or the previous afternoon, or the following morning.
clock | October 24, 2007No time to dig into this deeper myself, so check out what others are saying about the shennanigans at the American Chemical Society:
Alex Palazzo has two posts.
Revere also has two posts.
And then there is PZ Myers and his commenters.
Follow their links for more....
clock | October 24, 2007My brain is fried. My flight home was horrifying - the pilot warned us before we even left the gate that the weather is nasty and that he ordered the stewardess to remain seated at least the first 30 minutes of the flight. Did the warning make the experience more or less frightening? I think it made it more so. Yes, the wind played with our airplane as if it was a toy, but knowing that the pilot thought it was nasty made it less comforting that he is confident himself in his abilities to keep us afloat. The scariest was the landing - we were kicked around throughout the descent until the…
clock | October 23, 2007A quick update on the Milwaukee events....
The first time I went to Mocha's (much better wifi than the hotel and it is free) I saw a familiar face walk in - from Scifoo! World is small. She promised to come to the Science Blogging Conference (I am leaving the name out so not to play Gotcha later if she manages not to come in January). Jean-Claude, Janet, Christina Pikas and I went to dinner at Water Street Brewery last night - all four of us will meet again in January at the Science Blogging Conference. Janet, Jean-Claude and I had lunch at 105-year old German Mader's Restaurant. Back at…
clock | October 23, 2007Back at delightful Mocha's cafe on the corner...
We just finished our session at the ASIS&T conference: Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication, organized by K.T. Vaughan, moderated by Phillip Edwards. Janet Stemwedel, Jean-Claude Bradley and I were the panelists. There were about 50-60 people in the audience who asked some excellent questions afterwards.
I started off with defining science blogs and various uses they can be put to, in particular how they interact with other ways of scientific communication such as Open…
clock | October 21, 2007Heather Morrison:
Opposition to open access continues, while anti-OA coalition attempt implodes
Would a bold politician speak up for an unprecedented public good?
Full OA is a reasonable position, plus, compromise takes two!
Peter Murray-Rast:
Reconciling points of View
Deepak Singh:
Steve Brenner's Genome Commons
Glyn Moody:
Should We Tolerate Tolerated Use?
Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
ALA Says Contact Senate Before Noon Tomorrow to Support NIH Open Access Mandate
Richard Poynder:
The Basement Interviews: Peter Suber
Jonathan Eisen:
Whose genome should Roche/454 sequence to make up for selecting…
clock | October 21, 2007E-mail I got yesterday - please spread this around ASAP:
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The Senate is currently considering the FY08 Labor-HHS Bill, which includes a provision (already approved by the House of Representatives and the full Senate Appropriations Committee), that directs the NIH to change its Public Access Policy so that participation is required (rather than requested) for researchers, and ensures free, timely public access to articles resulting from NIH-funded research. On Friday, Senator Inhofe (R-OK), filed two amendments (#3416 and #3417), which call for the language to…
clock | October 20, 2007I am at ConvergeSouth right now. I did my session on Science 2.0 yesterday - it went smoothly. The meeting is fun as always. I am taking pictures and talking to all sorts of interesting people. I will have a more detailed report when I come back home late tonight or tomorrow morning.
clock | October 16, 2007As last week's Journal Club on PLoS ONE has been a success (and no, that does not mean it's over - feel free to add your commentary there), we are introducing a new one this week!
Members of the Potsdam Eye-Movement Group have now posted their comments and annotations on the article Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation.
You know your duty: go there, read the paper, read what the group has already posted in their commentary, register, and add your own comments and questions. Rate the article. If you blog about it, send your readers to do the same. If your blogging…
clock | October 16, 2007When I went to the Lawrence Hall of Science with Janet, I wore a PLoS T-shirt, of course. The volunteer at the museum, a high school student (you can see her here attaching a harness on Janet), saw my shirt and said "PLoS! Awesome!"
I asked her how she knew about it and why she seemed to like it so much and she told me that they use it in school all the time because it is full of cool information, it is free to read and free to use in presentations and such. Obviously, for her and similar students, the material in scientific papers does not go over their heads, no matter how dry the…
clock | October 12, 2007Alma Swan and Lawrence Lessig remind us that Creative Commons is celebrating its 5th birthday this December.
Alma writes:
Creative Commons (CC) is celebrating its 5th birthday. Lawrence Lessig has written to all supporters describing its 'dramatic' growth during the last quinquennium and yet acknowledging that as CC works to strengthen the underpinnings of participatory culture 'others are working equally hard to make sure culture remains proprietary'. Although this way of putting it is rather starkly black and white, and there remains a need for proper protection of creative rights in a…
clock | October 11, 2007Ghosts, drugs, and blogs:
By its hidden nature, it is obviously a challenge to determine the exact prevalence of "ghost management," defined by Sismondo as the phenomenon in which "pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of articles."
Of course they fight against Open Access Publishing - too much sunshine scares them and would make them scurry away in panic...
clock | October 9, 2007The recent return of Journal Clubs on PLoS ONE has been quite a success so far. People are watching from outside and they like what they see.
The first Journal Club article, on microbial metagenomics, has already, in just one week, gathered 3 ratings, each accompanied with a short comment, one trackback (this will be the second) and 7 annotations and 4 discussions eliciting further 14 responses in the comment threads. The 12-comment-and-growing thread on the usefulness of the term 'Prokaryote' is quite exciting, showing that it is not so hard to comment on PLoS ONE after all, once you get…
clock | October 8, 2007Some good, thought-provoking reads about the Web, social networking, publishing and blogging:
Aggregating scientific activity
Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results
Would limiting career publication number revamp scientific publishing?
The Public Library of Science group
The Seven Principles of Community Building
clock | October 6, 2007Jeffrey Pomerantz invited me to give a brownbag lunch presentation on Science 2.0 yesterday at noon at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was fun for me and I hope it was fun for the others in the room, about 20 or so of faculty and students in the School.
This was my first attempt at putting together such a presentation, something I will be called on to do several times over the next couple of months and more. I was happy I made it within one hour, excellent questions included, though I probably talked too long about blogs and…
clock | October 6, 2007That is one very interesting idea! This provision is usually used for getting medicines to 3rd world countries in times of emergency. So, why not research papers if the emergency warrants it? Gavin writes:
Imagine a scenario in which a developing country is facing a national health emergency, and there's a research article that contains information that is highly relevant to addressing that emergency. Let's say the emergency is an alarmingly high rate of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and a new study shows a major breakthrough in preventing such transmission. And let's say that…
clock | October 3, 2007From Pierre, we hear about a new system for calculating individuals' research impact - Publish Or Perish, based on Google Scholar.
Deepak, Pedro, Mark and Deepak again take a first look at Clinical Trials Hub and like what they see.
Jeff published a paper, but his Mom was more worried (in the comments) about the way he looks, with Congrats relegated to the afterthought.
SXSW Podcast on Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge has now been posted online. Worth a listen.
There is an article in Wired on science video sites, including JoVE, LabAction and SciVee and Attila provides deeper…
clock | October 3, 2007Before two papers passed the peer-review and got published, WHO (which was given the data) made its own interpretation of the findings and included it in its press kit, including the errors they made in that interpretation. A complex story - what's your take on it?
clock | October 2, 2007Journal Clubs are a popular feature on PLoS ONE papers. There were several of them in the spring. Now, after a brief summer break, the Journal Clubs are going live again and they will happen on a regular basis, perhaps as frequently as one per week.
What does it mean - a Journal Club? In short, a lab group volunteers to discuss one of the more recent (or even upcoming, not yet published) PLoS ONE papers and to post their discussion as a series of comments, annotations and ratings on the paper itself, triggering a discussion within a broader scientific community.
The first group that will…
clock | October 1, 2007Yes, I'll be there this Friday. Come by and say Hello if you are in the building or close at lunchtime.