open science
clock | December 11, 2008Scott Derrickson, director of the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, talks about his take on the iconic sci-fi movie. And Nobel laureate, Richard Roberts, discusses the importance of open-access science publishing. Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news.
Listen here.
clock | December 11, 2008Sam Dupuis (yes, the son of John) contacted Michael Nielsen and posted a nice, smart, long blog interview. Check it out.
clock | December 8, 2008News from Science Commons:
Today, we are proud to announce the release of Science Commons' first informational video. The video was directed by renowned director Jesse Dylan, the director of the Emmy- award winning "Yes We Can" Barack Obama campaign video with musical artist will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. The video can also be seen on the front of sciencecommons.org.
"I believe Science Commons represents the true aspiration of the web, and I wanted to tell their story," Dylan said. "They've changed the way we think about exploration and discovery; the important and innovative ideas need…
clock | November 29, 2008Philip Johnson makes some back-of-the-envelope calculations, very conservatively assuming that all OA journals are author-pay (not true) and all author fees for publishing are born by the Universities (not true) and concludes that even with such harsh handicapping, universities that switched to OA-only policies would immediately save substantial amounts of money (also check the excellent comments on that post):
Subscription costs would obviously be nil for an open access journal: we are all free to access the content of an open access journal via the internet, with no restrictions on who can…
clock | November 28, 2008The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally.
Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It is interesting how cultural…
clock | November 20, 2008Garrett Lisi's Exceptional Approach to Everything:
When Lisi published his physics paper, "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," to an online archive last year, it created a media buzz about his lifestyle and an onslaught of support and skepticism about his model. Although the verdict is still out on whether Lisi's theory will prove predicatively accurate, the means by which he released and vetted his research point to a larger trend in the scientific community.
Barriers to data are falling, a cross-disciplinary community of commenters is replacing journal-selected peer reviewers,…
clock | November 20, 2008An interesting and insightful article by Vivian Siegel:
It is ironic that, in an era known for the great speed and availability of information - where we could choose to blog our results rather than submit them to journals - publishing papers seems slower and more painful than ever before.
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I believe our best hope for fair and constructive decisions is to relieve reviewers of the responsibility to make recommendations for or against publication and to maintain a separate, much smaller pool of editors who can be dedicated to the journal and to its standards, and…
clock | November 19, 2008A nice article in the HHMI Bulletin:
Slowly, however, the culture is changing, not only through blogs but also by means of open notebooks, open publishing, and other interactive models. Those involved call it Science 2.0, an effort to harness the capabilities of the Internet to help scientists communicate better among themselves as well as to the public at large.
clock | November 19, 2008And, while on the topic of "Science by press release", it struck me that announcing intentions of future research is a Good Thing. Isn't that what we are all talking about - Open Science?
If you signal in advance that you are working on something, you allow others to either move on to something else so as not to duplicate the effort, or to speed up their work in order to scoop you, or to give you a call and offer to collaborate. The second option is likely to be rare and localized in a few research fields that are hugely competitive (e.g., cancer research). The first and the third options…
clock | November 18, 2008On the Seed Magazine site...:
ScienceBloggers discuss the advantages of open science and debate the necessity of the current peer-review system.
Nice! But of course I'd say that. Just to emphasize, in case the article does not make it clear enough, Open Access and changes in peer-review will both be a result of the Age of the Web, but the two are not necessarily tied to each other in each individual instance of a publishing venue. Different journals, pre-print sites, etc., are experimenting with OA and with changes in peer-review in different ways and at different rates, the two processes…
clock | November 17, 2008ObamaCTO (independent of the Obama transition team) is a site for recommending ideas to Obama's new Chief Technology Officer. You can go and suggest ideas or vote on ideas already there.
I just voted for this suggestion - "Require open access for publicly-funded research". You should vote for it as well and add a comment if you care about this issue (and I bet most of my readers do).
See also Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda: Recommendations to President-elect Obama and Congress, report (pdf)
(via)
clock | November 13, 2008RSS Feed aggregators as sources of information and knowledge in medical sciences (in Serbian - PDF) is an excellent article by Vedran Vucic geared towards medical professionals in Serbia. He will talk about this at the Belgrade's Medical School this Saturday as a part of a symposium on electronic libraries, biomedical information, and Open Access.
clock | November 13, 2008My SciBling, John Wilbanks has been interviewed for Seed Magazine's Game Changers series. Watch the movie:
John will be at ScienceOnline09, leading a session on Semantic web in science: how to build it, how to use it.
Hat - tip: Kaitlin Thaney (who can also be seen in the movie in the background, sitting at her desk at Science Commons and typing something while John is talking).
clock | November 11, 2008Here is a great example by Cameron Neylon:
It's a little embarrassing...
...but being straightforward is always the best approach. Since we published our paper in PLoS ONE a few months back I haven't been as happy as I was about the activity of our Sortase. What this means is that we are now using a higher concentration of the enzyme to do our ligation reactions. They seem to be working well and with high yields, but we need to put in more enzyme. If you don't understand that don't worry - just imagine you posted a carefully thought out recipe and then discovered you couldn't get that same…
clock | November 10, 2008There is a very nice interview with Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) about Open Access:
We find that the more policy makers delve into the issue and understand the benefits of the mandate for advancing science and improving public health, the more committed and supportive they become. The roadblocks we've run into have been largely the result of misinformation--members of Congress have been told everything from, "the policy will encourage government censorship of science," to, "the policy will destroy peer review," to…
clock | November 6, 2008Today's issue of Genome Technology contains six nice articles about Open Access:
Ready or Not, Here Comes Open Access:
Here's the central conundrum of the open access debate: you can't find anyone who's actually opposed to it. Really. For all the grandstanding and arguing, the fiercest opponents and supporters alike tend to support the underlying principle -- that freely accessible data would be a boon to the greater scientific enterprise. In an ideal world, most everyone agrees, there would be no restrictions on scientific results. It's the real-world practical concerns that provide the…
clock | November 4, 2008
If you are wondering why I posted this picture and what it all (including the title of this post) means, you need to read the comment threads on these posts:
The Transition to Daylight Savings Time and the Risk of Myocardial Infarction
The Response from Janszky and Ljung -- Dr. Isis Defends the Blogosphere
What is 'the normal way to debate and discuss scientific findings' anyway?
Spring Forward, Fall Back - should you watch out tomorrow morning?
Notes of importance
Bora is the Most Brilliant Man Ever and I Love Him
Pseudonimity, scientific criticism and respect on the blogs...
Discourse give…
clock | November 4, 2008Low-Hanging Fruit is a website which collects data about drug/compound screens against parasitic organisms.
Michelle Arkin and James McKerrow explain:
The apples on the tree at the website represent links to data for the parasites indicated. In some cases, this data is a simple list of hits to be viewed by those individuals and agencies interested in rapid follow-up. In other instances, a more complete database can be accessed under "protocols and statistics" as compiled by Pipeline Pilot (Accelrys) software.
clock | October 31, 2008Duncan Hull and colleagues just published an excellent, must-read article - Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web:
Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as "thought in cold storage," and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational…