If we imagine what the specification for building a scholarly communications system would look like there are some fairly obvious things we would want it to enable. Registration of priority, archival, re-use and replication, and filtering. Some of these the current system can do well, some of them not so. Can thinking about how …

I talk a lot about building tools that make it easy capture all the objects that we create as part of the research process and then connect all of these up together. Thus far there have been small and limited demonstrators. This is a proposal to build something that demonstrates the general principle at …

If you’ve been around either myself or Deepak Singh you will almost certainly have heard the Jeff Jonas/Jon Udell soundbite: ‘Data finds data. Then people find people’. The naïve analysis of the success of consumer social networks and the weaknesses of science communication has lead to efforts that almost precisely invert the Jonas/Udell concept. …

I wrote a few weeks back about the idea of re-imagining the formally published scientific paper as an aggregation of objects. I asserted that the tools for achieving this are more or less in place. Actually that is only half true. The tools for storing, displaying, and even to some extent archiving communications in …

On April 26 I am attending a joint meeting of the NSF and EuroHORCS (European Heads of Research Councils) on “Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age”. I have been asked to submit a one page white paper in advance of the meeting and have been struggling a little with this. This …

Suddenly it seems everyone wants to re-imagine scientific communication. From the ACS symposium a few weeks back to a PLoS Forum, via interesting conversations with a range of publishers, funders and scientists, it seems a lot of people are thinking much more seriously about how to make scientific communication more effective, more appropriate to …

This is the second of two posts discussing the talk I gave at the Science 2.0 Symposium organized by Greg Wilson in Toronto in July. As I described in the last post Jon Udell pulled out the two key points from my talk and tweeted them. The first suggested some ideas about what the …

Some months ago now I gave a talk at very exciting symposium organized by Greg Wilson as a closer for the Software Carpentry course he was running at Toronto University. It was exciting because of the lineup but also because it represented a real coming together of views on how developments in computer science and infrastructure as well as new …

In the previous post  I discussed a workflow using Wave to author and publish a paper. In this post I want to look at the possibility of using it as a laboratory record, or more specifically as a human interface to the laboratory record. There has been much work in recent years on research …

Yes, I’m afraid it’s yet another over the top response to yesterday’s big announcement of Google Wave, the latest paradigm shifting gob-smackingly brilliant piece of technology (or PR depending on your viewpoint) out of Google. My interest, however is pretty specific, how can we leverage it to help us capture, communicate, and publish research? …