Tag: psb09-openscience

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Reflections on the Open Science workshop at PSB09

In a few hours I will be giving a short presentation to the whole of the PSB conference on the workshop that we ran on Monday. We are still thinking through the details of what has come out of this and hopefully the discussion will continue in any case so this is a personal view. The slides for the presentation are available at Slideshare.

To me there were a couple of key points that came out. Many of these are not surprising but bear repeating:

  • Citation and improving and expanding the way it is used lies at the core of making sure that people get credit for the work they do and making the widest range of useful contributions to the research community
  • Persistence of identity, and persistence of objects (in general the persistence of resources) is absolutely critical to making a wider citation culture work. We must know who generated something and be able to point to it in the long term to deliver on the potential of credits.
  • “If you build it they won’t come” – building a service, whether a technical or a social one, depends on a community that uses and adds value to those services. Build the service for the community and build the community for the service. Don’t solve the problems that you think people have – solve the ones that they tell you they have

The main point for me grew out of the panel session and was perhaps articulated best by Drew Endy. Identify specific problems (not ideological issues) and make process more efficient. Ideology may help to guide us but it can also blind you to specific issues and hide the underlying reasons for specific successes and failures from our view. We have a desperate need for both qualitative data, stories about successes and failures, and quantitative data, hard numbers on uptake and the consequences of uptake of specific practice.

Taking inspiration from Drew’s keynote, we have an evolved system for doing research that is not designed to be easily understood or modified. We need to take an experimental approach to identifying and solving specific problems that would let us increase the efficiency of the research process. Drew’s point was that this should be a proper research discipline in it’s own right, with the funding and respect that goes with it. For the presentation I summarised this as follows:

Improving the research process is an area for (experimental) research that requires the same rigour, standards (and funding) as anything else that we do

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Brief running report on the Open Science Workshop at PSB09

Just a very brief rundown of what happened at the workshop this morning and some central themes that came out of it. The slides from the talks are available on Slideshare and recorded video from most of the talks (unfortunately not Dave de Roure‘s or Phil Bourne‘s at the moment) is available on my Mogulus channel (http://www.mogulus.com/cameron_neylon – click on Video on Demand and select the PSB folder). The commentary from the conference is available in the PSB 2009 Friendfeed room.

For me there were three main themes that came through from the talks and the panel session. The first was one that has come up in many contexts but most recently in Phil Bourne and Lyn Fink’s perspectives article in PLos Computational Biology; the need for persistent identity tokens to track people’s contributions, and a need to re-think how citation works, and what citations are used for.

The second theme was a need for more focus on specific issues, including domain specific problems or barriers, where “greasing the wheels” could make a direct difference to people’s ability to do their research. Solving specific problems that are not necessarily directly associated with “openness” as an ideological movement. Similar ideas were raised in discussion of tool and service development, the need to build the user into the process of service design and solve the problems users have, rather than those the developer may think they ought to be worrying about.

But probably the main theme that came through for me was the need to identify and measure real outcomes from adopting more open practice. This was the central theme of Heather‘s talk but also came up strongly in the panel session. We have little if any quantitative information on the benefits of open practice and  there are still relatively few examples of complete examples of open research projects. More research and more aggregation of examples will help here but there is a desperate need for numbers and details to help funders, policy makers, and researchers themselves to make informed choices about what approaches are worth adopting, and indeed which are not.

The session was a good conversation, with some great talks, and lots of people involved throughout. Even with a three hour slot we ran 30 minutes over and could have kept talking for quite a bit longer. We will keep posting material over the next few days so please continue the discussion over at Friendfeed and on the workshop website.