Michael Nielsen is a good friend as well as being an inspiration to many of us in the Open Science community. I’ve been privileged to watch and in a small way to contribute to the development of his arguments and expertise over the years and I found the distillation of these years of effort into the talk that he recently gave at TEDxWaterloo entirely successful.I therefore have to admit to being somewhat nonplussed by GrrrlScientist’s assessment of the talk that “Dr Nielsen has missed — he certainly has not emphasised — the most obvious reason why the Open Science movement will not work: credit.”

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.

I have long being sceptical of the costs and value delivered by our traditional methods of peer review. This is really on two fronts, firstly that the costs, where they have been estimated are extremely high, representing a multi-billion dollar subsidy by governments of the scholarly publishing industry. Secondly the value that is delivered through peer review, the critical analysis of claims, informed opinion on the quality of the experiments, is largely lost. At best it is wrapped up in the final version of the paper. At worst it is …

I wouldn’t normally try to pick a fight with Chad Orzel, and certainly not over a post which I mostly agree with, but I wanted to take some issue with the slant in his relatively recent post We are science (see also a good discussion in the comments).  Chad makes a cogent argument that there is a lot of whining about credit and rewards and that ‘Science’ or ‘The Powers That Be’ are blamed for a lot of these things. His point is that ‘We are science’ – and that …

I hold no particular candle for traditional peer review. I think it is inefficient, poorly selective, self reinforcing, often poorly done, and above all, far too slow. However I also agree that it is the least worst system we have available to us.  Thus far, no other approaches have worked terribly well, at least in the communication of science research. And as the incumbent for the past fifty years or so in the post of ‘generic filter’ it is owed some respect for seniority alone.
So I am considering writing a …

This post is an opinion piece and not a rigorous objective analysis. It is fair to say that I am on the record as and advocate of the principles behind PLoS ONE and am also in favour of post publication peer review and this should be read in that light. [ed I’ve also modified this slightly from the original version because I got myself mixed up in an Excel spreadsheet]
To me, anonymous peer review is, and always has been, broken. The central principle of the scientific method is that …

This is the second in a series of posts (first one here) in which I am trying to process and collect ideas that came out of Scifoo. This post arises out of a discussion I had with Michael Eisen (UC Berkely) and Sean Eddy (HHMI Janelia Farm) at lunch on the Saturday. We had drifted from a discussion of the problem of attribution stacking and citing datasets (and datasets made up of datasets) into the problem of academic credit. I had trotted out the usual spiel about the need for …

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Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality:
What is being generated here is new science, and science isn’t paid for per se. The resources that generate science are supported by governments, charities, and industry but the actual production of science is not supported. The truly radical approach to this would be to turn the system on its head. Don’t …

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Once again a range of conversations in different places have collided in my feed reader. Over on Nature Networks, Martin Fenner posted on Researcher ID which lead to a discussion about attribution and in particular Martin’s comment that there was a need to be able to link to comments and the necessity of timestamps. Then DrugMonkey posted a thoughtful blog about the issue of funding body staff introducing ideas from unsuccessful grant proposals they have handled to projects which they have a responsibility in guiding.

Another post prompted by an exchange of comments on Neil Saunder’s blog. The discussion here started about the somewhat arbitrary nature of what does and does not get counted as ‘worthy contributions’ in the research community. Neil was commenting on an article in Nature Biotech that had similar subject matter to some Blog posts, and he was reflecting on the fact that one would look convincing on a CV and the others wouldn’t. The conversation in the comments drifted somewhat into a discussion of peer review with Maxine (I am …