Science Practice

As the boundaries between formal and informal scientific communication is blurring - think of pre-print sites, Open Notebook Science and blogs, for starters - the issue of what is citable and how it should be cited is becoming more and more prominent. There is a very interesting discussion on this topic in the comments section at the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, discussing the place of science blogs in the new communication ecosystem and if a blog post can be and should be cited. What counts as a "real publication"? Is the use of the phrase "real publication" in itself…

As you may have noticed if you saw this or you follow me on Twitter/FriendFeed/Facebook, I spent half of Tuesday and all of Wednesday at the XXVI International Association of Science Parks World Conference on Science & Technology Parks in Raleigh. The meeting was actually longer (starting on Sunday and ending today), but I was part of a team and we divided up our online coverage the best we could do. Christopher Perrien assembled a team (including his son) to present (and represent) Science In The Triangle, the new local initiative. They manned a booth at which they not only showcased…

You have proven your fitness, evolutionarily speaking, not when you have babies, but when your babies have babies. So I am very excited that my babies - the three science blogging conferences here in the Triangle so far - have spawned their own offspring. Not once, but twice. The London franchise will happen again this year. And just like we changed the name from Science Blogging Conference into ScienceOnline, so did they. Science Online London 2009 will take place on Saturday August 22, 2009 at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London, co-hosted by Nature Network, Mendeley and the…

Pete Binfield, the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE, presented a webinar about article-level metrics to NISO - see also the blog post about it: Article-Level Metrics (at PLoS and beyond) Tags: PLoS PLoS ONE PLoSONE ONE Journal articlelevelmetrics article level metrics binfield COUNTER onlineusage usage academicjournals academic journals journals library Public Library of Science science citations openaccess OA

There have been quite a few posts over the last few days about commenting, in particular about posting comments, notes and ratings on scientific papers. But this also related to commenting on blogs and social networks, commenting on newspaper online articles, the question of moderation vs. non-moderation, and the question of anonymity vs. pseudonymity vs. RL identity. You may want to re-visit this old thread first, for introduction on commenting on blogs. How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online by Robert Niles goes back into history to explain why the comments…

Last year in May, when I visited Belgrade, I gave interviews with Radio Belgrade, talking about science publishing, Open Access, science communication and science blogging. The podcasts of these interviews - yes, they are in Serbian! - are now up: Part 1 Part 2 I know that this blog has some ex-Yugoslavs in its regular audience, people who can understand the language. I hope you enjoy the interviews and spread the word if you like them.

Some 47 million years ago, Ida suffocated in the volcanic ashes. I feel the same way at the end of this week - I need to get some air. And some sleep. But watching the media and blog coverage of the fossil around the clock for a few days was actually quite interesting, almost exhilarating - and there are probably not as many people out there who, like me, read pretty much everything anyone said about it this week. Interestingly, my own feel of the coverage was different if I assumed an angle of a scientist, an angle of an interested student of the changes in the media ecosystem, and an angle…

A special issue of JCOM, Journal of Science Communication, has just issued a call for submissions, with the deadline moved to June 1st, 2009: Science is increasingly being produced, discussed and deliberated with cooperative tools by web users and without the institutionalized presence of scientists. "Popular science" or "Citizen science" are two of the traditional ways of defining science grassroots produced outside the walls of laboratories. But the internet has changed the way of collecting and organising the knowledge produced by people - peers - who do not belong to the established…

The UCLA Pro-Test is tomorrow. If you live there - go. If not, prepare yourself for inevitable discussions - online and offline - by getting informed. And my fellow science bloggers have certainly provided plenty of food for thought on the issue of use of animals in research. First, you have to read Janet Stemwedel's ongoing series (5 parts so far, but more are coming) about the potential for dialogue between the two (or more) sides: Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 1).: Now, maybe it's the case that everyone who cares at all has staked out a position on the use of animals…

I know it's been a couple of months now since the ScienceOnline'09 and I have reviewed only a couple of sessions I myself attended and did not do the others. I don't know if I will ever make it to reviewing them one by one, but other people's reviews on them are under the fold here. For my previous reviews of individual sessions, see this, this, this, this and this. What I'd like to do today is pick up on a vibe I felt throughout the meeting. And that is the question of Power. The word has a number of dictionary meanings, but they are all related. I'll try to relate them here and hope you…

In today's PLoS Computational Biology: Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article: Scientific innovation depends on finding, integrating, and re-using the products of previous research. Here we explore how recent developments in Web technology, particularly those related to the publication of data and metadata, might assist that process by providing semantic enhancements to journal articles within the mainstream process of scholarly journal publishing. We exemplify this by describing semantic enhancements we have made to a recent biomedical…

About a week ago, my brother sent me a couple of interesting papers about funding in science, one in Canada, the other in the UK. I barely had time to skim the abstracts at the time, but thought I would put it up for discussion online and come back to it later. So I posted the link, abstract and brief commentary a few days ago to the article: Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant: Abstract: Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian)…

This is very interesting, referring to Canadian system: Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant: Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100% of qualified applicants…

Daniel Lemire asks this question when observing a fallacy voiced in an editorial: .....only a small fraction of the top 100 papers ranked by the number of citations (17 of 100) were published by single authors.....a published paper resulting from collaborative work has a higher chance of attracting more citations. You can discuss the fallacy if you want, but I am much more interested in the next question that Daniel asks - are solo authors and groups of authors inherently attracted to different kinds of problems, or if solo vs. group dynamics make some projects more conducive for solo work…

Science Depends on the Diffusion of Knowledge: According to the National Science Foundation, there are over 2.5 million research workers worldwide, with more than 1.2 million in the U.S. alone.1 If we look at all the articles, reports, emails and conversations that pass between them, we could count billions of knowledge transactions every year. This incredible diffusion of knowledge is the very fabric of science. Given that the diffusion of knowledge is central to science, it behooves us to see if we can accelerate it. We note that diffusion takes time. Sometimes it takes a long time. Every…

Dorothea found an intriguing survey - If it's not online... - in which physicists and astronomers say, pretty much, that 'if an article is not online then it is not worth the effort to obtain it'. An interesting discussion (with a couple of more links added by others) ensued here. What do you assume if a paper is not online? Do you track it down anyway? What are your criteria for choosing to do so?

The unmovable movers! Or so says Bill Hooker: For instance: I use Open Office in preference to Word because I'm willing to put up with a short learning curve and a few inconveniences, having (as they say here in the US) drunk the Open Kool-Aid. But I'm something of an exception. Faced with a single difficulty, one single function that doesn't work exactly like it did in Word, the vast majority of researchers will throw a tantrum and give up on the new application. After all, the Department pays the Word license, so it's there to be used, so who cares about monopolies and stifling free culture…

The Two Cultures in the 21st Century: A full-day symposium sponsored by: Science & the City, ScienceDebate2008, Science Communication Consortium At the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture on the importance to society of building a bridge between the sciences and humanities, this day-long symposium brings together leading scholars, scientists, politicians, authors, and representatives of the media to explore the persistence of the Two Cultures gap and how it can be overcome. More than 20 speakers will cover topics including science in politics, education, film and media,…

Wow! This is massive! From Anesthesiology News: Scott S. Reuben, MD, of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., a pioneer in the area of multimodal analgesia, is said to have fabricated his results in at least 21, and perhaps many more, articles dating back to 1996. The confirmed articles were published in Anesthesiology, Anesthesia and Analgesia, the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia and other titles, which have retracted the papers or will soon do so, according to people familiar with the scandal (see list). The journals stressed that Dr. Reuben's co-authors on those papers have not…

Bill decided to take a look: Fooling around with numbers: Interesting, no? If the primary measure of a journal's value is its impact -- pretty layouts and a good Employment section and so on being presumably secondary -- and if the Impact Factor is a measure of impact, and if publishers are making a good faith effort to offer value for money -- then why is there no apparent relationship between IF and journal prices? After all, publishers tout the Impact Factors of their offerings whenever they're asked to justify their prices or the latest round of increases in same. There's even some…