A quick update

I have got very behind. I’ve only just realised just how far behind but my excuse is that I have been rather busy. How far behind I was was brought home by the fact that I hadn’t actually commented as yet that the proposal for an Open Science session at PSB that was driven primarily by Shirley Wu has gone in and the proposal is now up at Nature Precedings. The posting there has already generated some new contacts.

On Tuesday I gave a talk at UKOLN at the University of Bath. Brian Kelly kindly videoed the first 10 minutes of the presentation when my attempts to record a screencast failed miserably and has blogged about the talk and on recording talks more generally for public consumption. Jean-Claude does this very effectively but this is something we should perhaps all be more putting a lot more effort into (and can someone tell me what the best software for recording screencasts is?!?). I got a lot of the talk on audio recording and will attempt to record a screencast when I can find time.
The talk was interesting; this was to a group of library/repository/curation/technical experts rather than the usual attempt to convince a group of sceptical scientists. Many of them are already ‘open’ advocates but are focused on technical issues. Lots of smart question on how do you really manage secure identities across multiple systems; how do we make data on the cloud stable for the long term; how do you choose between competing standards for describing and collating data; fundamentally how do you actually make all this work. Interesting discussion all in all and great to meet the people at UKOLN and finally meet Liz Lyon in person.

The other thing happening this week is that tomorrow and Friday we are running a small workshop introducing potential users to our Blog based notebook. Our aim is to see how other people’s working processes do or don’t fit into our system. This is still focused on biochemistry/molecular biology but it will be very interesting to see what comes out of this. I will try to report as soon as possible.

Finally; I think there is something in the air. This week has seen a rush of emails from people who have seen Blog posts, proposals, and other things writing to offer support, and perhaps more crucially access to more contacts.

And further on the PLoS front the biggest story in the UK news on Tuesday morning was about the paper in PLoS Medicine reporting on the results of a meta-study of the effectiveness of SSRIs in treating depression. I woke up to this story on BBC radio and by the time I gave my talk at 10:30 I’d had a chance at least to read the paper abstract. If I’d been on SSRIs this could be really important to me. Perhaps more to the point, if I were a doctor realising I’d be fielding phone calls from concerned patients all day, I could have read the paper. This story tells us a lot about why Open Access and Open Data are crucial. But more on that in another post sometime…I promise.