In a few hours I will be giving a short presentation to the whole of the PSB conference on the workshop that we ran on Monday. We are still thinking through the details of what has come out of this and hopefully the discussion will continue in any case so this is a personal view. The slides for the presentation are available at Slideshare.
To me there were a couple of key points that came out. Many of these are not surprising but bear repeating:

Citation and improving and expanding the way …

Just a very brief rundown of what happened at the workshop this morning and some central themes that came out of it. The slides from the talks are available on Slideshare and recorded video from most of the talks (unfortunately not Dave de Roure‘s or Phil Bourne‘s at the moment) is available on my Mogulus channel (http://www.mogulus.com/cameron_neylon – click on Video on Demand and select the PSB folder). The commentary from the conference is available in the PSB 2009 Friendfeed room.
For me there were three main themes that came through …

As I noted in the last post we are rapidly counting down towards the final few days before the Open Science Workshop at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. I am flying out from Sydney to Hawaii this afternoon and may or may not have network connectivity in the days leading up the meeting. So just some quick notes here on where you can find any final information if you are coming or if you want to follow online.
The workshop website is available at psb09openscience.wordpress.com and this is where information will …

All good traditions require someone to make an arbitrary decision to do something again. Last year I threw up a few New Year’s resolutions in the hours before NYE in the UK. Last night I was out on the shore of Sydney Harbour. I had the laptop – I thought about writing something – and then I thought – nah I can just lie here and look at the pretty lights. However I did want to follow up the successes and failures of last year’s resolutions and maybe make a …

Yesterday on the train I had a most remarkable experience of synchronicity. I had been at the RIN workshop on the costs of scholarly publishing (more on that later) in London and was heading of to Oxford for a group dinner. On the train I was looking for a seat with a desk and took one up opposite a guy with a slightly battered looking mac laptop. As I pulled out my new Macbook (13” 2.4 GHz, 4 Gb memory since you ask) he leaned across to have a good …

…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 …

For anyone in the UK who lives under a stone, or those people elsewhere in the world who don’t follow British news, this week there has been at least some news beyond the ongoing economic crisis and a U.S. election. Two media ‘personalities’ have been excoriated for leaving what can only be described as crass and offensive messages on an elderly actor’s answer phone, while on air. What made the affair worse was that the radio programme was in fact recorded and someone, somewhere, made a decision to broadcast it …

The Open Knowledge Foundation is running a workshop on finding and re-using open science resources. More details are available on the okf blog and wiki. I will be there along with a number of more interesting and important people. Come along and contribute to the discussion of how we can use what’s out there and how we can get a lot more of it.

This is the fourth and final part of the serialisation of a draft paper on Open Science. The other parts are here – Part I – Part II – Part III
A question that needs to be asked when contemplating any major change in practice is the balance and timing of ‘bottom up’ versus ‘top-down’ approaches for achieving that change. Scientists are notoriously un-responsive to decrees and policy initiatives but as has been discussed they are also inherently conservative and generally resistant to change led from within the community as well. …

The third installment of the paper (first part, second part) where I discuss social issues around practicing more Open Science.
Scientists are inherently rather conservative in their adoption of new approaches and tools. A conservative approach has served the community well in the process of sifting ideas and claims; this approach is well summarised by the aphorism ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. New methodologies and tools often struggle to be accepted until the evidence of their superiority is overwhelming. It is therefore unreasonable to expect the rapid adoption of new web …