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 we would design a system from the ground up help us to think about what we can do today to build a better and more effective record?

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 this coming weekend’s Science Hack Day in London.

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. In the case of most of these “Facebooks for Scientists” the idea is that people find people, and then they connect with data through those people. But what if we built social networks for data, where they could interact, find neighbours, and play games amongst themselves?

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 this form do exist, at least in the form of examples. But we still need authoring and publishing tools to make the overall vision work.

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 is stage one, a draft document relating to researcher identifiers.

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 the 21st century and above all, to take more advantage of the power of the web. For me, the “paper” of the future has to encompass much more than just the narrative descriptions of processed results we have today. Here I discuss the idea of the research communication as an aggregation of objects that are linked together into a story by an “editor”. This has the potential both to encompass what papers look like today and prepare us for a much more diverse future. At the same time if we built our research communications this way we get the semantic web for research data more or less as a free extra.

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 limiting unit of science, or rather science communication, might be. The second takes me in to rather more controversial areas:
@cameronneylon uses tags to classify records in a bio lab wiki. When emergent ontology doesn’t match 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 social capabilities brought about by computer networks are changing scientific research.I talked, as I have several times recently, about the idea of a web-native laboratory record, thinking about what the paper notebook would look like if …

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 portals and Virtual Research Environments. While this work will remain useful in defining use patterns and interface design my feeling is that Wave will become the environment of choice, a framework for a virtual research environment …

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? And my opinion is that this is absolutely game changing – it makes a whole series of problems simply go away, and potentially provides a route to solving many of the problems that I was struggling …