Response to Request for Information – FR Doc. 2011-28621
Dr Cameron Neylon – U.K. based research scientist writing in a personal capacity
Introduction
Thankyou for the opportunity to respond to this request for information and to the parallel RFI on access to scientific publications. Many of the higher level policy issues relating to data are covered in my response to the other RFI and I refer to that response where appropriate here. Specifically I re-iterate my point that a focus on IP in the publication is a non-productive approach. Rather it is more …

Response to Request for Information – FR Doc. 2011-28623
Dr Cameron Neylon – U.K. based research scientist writing in a personal capacity
Introduction
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to this request for information. As a researcher based in the United Kingdom and Europe, it might be argued that I have a conflict of interest. In some ways it is in my interest for U.S. federally funded research to be uncompetitive. There are many opportunities that have been brought through evolving technology that have the potential to increase the efficiency of research …

Dear Representatives Maloney and Issa,
I am writing to commend your strong commitment to the recognition of intellectual property contributions to research communication. As we move to a modern knowledge economy, supported by the technical capacity of the internet, it is crucial that we have clarity on the ownership of intellectual property arising from the federal investment in research. For the knowledge economy to work effectively it is crucial that all players receive fair recompense for the contribution of intellectual property that they make and the services that they provide.
As a …

One of the things you notice as a visitor from the UK in South Africa is how clean the toilets are. In restaurants, at the University, in public places. Sometimes a bit worn down but always clean. And then you start to notice how clear and clean the pavements are and your first response, well at least my first response, is that this is a sign of things going right. One element of the whole is working well. But of course one of the main reasons for this is that …

The Royal Society is running a public consultation exercise on Science as a Public Enterprise. Submissions are requested to answer a set of questions. Here are my answers. This is not the first time that the research community has faced this issue. Indeed it is not even the first time the Royal Society has played a central role. The precursors of the Royal Society played a key role in persuading the community that effective sharing of their research outputs would improve research. The development of journals and the development of a values system that demanded that results be made public took time and leadership. It is to be hoped that we tackle those challenges and opportunities with the same sense of purpose.

On Monday 30 May I gave evidence at a European Commission hearing on Access to Scientific Information. This is the text that I spoke from. Just to re-inforce my usual disclaimer I was not speaking on behalf of my employer but as an independent researcher.
We live in a world where there is more information available at the tips of our fingers than even existed 10 or 20 years ago. Much of what we use to evaluate research today was built in a world where the underlying data was difficult and …

What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of doing scientific research. One partly inspired by the modular building blocks approach of some of the best open source software projects but also by a view that there were tremendous efficiency gains to be found in enabling specialisation of researchers, groups, even institutes, while encouraging a shared technical and social infrastructure that would help people identify the right partners for the very specific tasks that they needed doing today. The problem of course is that science funding is not configured that way, a problem that is that bane of any core-facility manager’s existence. Maintaining a permanent expert staff via a hand to mouth existence of short term grants is tough. But the world is changing, a few weeks ago I got a query from a commercial partner interested in whether I could solve a specific problem. This is a small “virtual company” that aims to target the small scale, but potentially high value, innovations that larger players don’t have the flexibility to handle. Everything is outsourced, samples prepared and passed from contractor to contractor. This is the first real contact I’ve had with this kind of approach in the research space but maybe these ideas are starting to take hold.

I’ve been interested for some time in capturing information and the context in which that information is created in the lab. The question of how to build an efficient and useable laboratory recording system is fundamentally one of how much information is necessary to record and how much of that can be recorded while bothering the researcher themselves as little as possible. The problem with sophisticated systems that can catch everything is that they break. The problem with simple systems is that they don’t provide enough structure to be useful. But a little structure with a simple framework, like twitter, might provide a route to getting a lot of useful information easy recorded for a lab record.

Last Friday I spoke at the STM Innovation Seminar in London, taking in general terms the theme I’ve been developing recently of focussing on enabling user discovery rather than providing central filtering, enabling people to act as their own gatekeeper rather than publishers taking that role on themselves. The example I used, the JACS hydride oxidation paper, wasn’t such a good example because, as a retraction, there is more detailed information available in the published retraction. Had it come a few days earlier the arsenic microbes paper, and subsequent detailed critique might well have made a better example. But both of these examples seem to be pointing towards a world in which post publication peer review is not just happening, but expected. How can publishers work to make the best of this new information and treat papers as the beginning of a story rather than its end?

A small set of possible biographies are provided below with different slants for conference programs etc.
Short version
Cameron Neylon is Professor of Research Communication at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University where he is co-lead on the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative. He is interested in how to make the internet more effective as a tool for scholarship. He writes and speaks regularly on scholarly communication, the design of web based tools for research, and the need for policy and cultural change within and around the research community.
Cameron Neylon …