Tag: science21

Posted on

The long slow catchup…

I’m a little shell shocked really. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks running around like a lunatic, being at meetings, organising meetings, flying out to other meetings. And then flying back to try and catch up with all the things that need doing before the next flurry of activity strikes (which involves less travel and more experiments you will be pleased to know). There are two things I desperately need to write up.

The Open Science workshop at Southampton on September 1 seemed to be well received and was certainly interesting for me.  Despite having a very diverse group of people we did seem to manage to have a sensible discussion that actually came to some conclusions. This was followed up by discussions with the web publishing group at Nature where some of these ideas were refined – more on this will follow!

Following on from this (and with a quick afternoon jaunt to Bristol for the Bristol Knowlege Unconference on the evening of September 5 I flew to Toronto en route to Waterloo for Science in the 21st Century, allowing for a brief stop for a Nature Network Toronto pub night panel session with Jen Dodd, Michael Nielsen, and Timo Hannay. The organisers of Science21, but in particular Sabine Hossenfelder, deserve huge congratulations for putting together one of the most diverse and exciting conferences I have ever been to. With speakers from historians to sociologists, hedge fund managers to writers, and even the odd academic scientist the sheer breadth of material covered was quite breathtaking.

You can see most of the talks and associated material on the Perimeter Institute Seminar Archive page here. The friendfeed commentary is also available in the science21 room. Once again it was a great pleasure to meet people I kind of knew but hadn’t ever actually met such as Greg Wilson and John Dupuis as well as to meet new people including (but by no means limited to) Harry Collins, Paul Guinnessy, and David Kaiser. We have yet to establish whether I knew Jen Dodd in a previous life…

Very many ideas will come out of this meeting I think – and I have no doubt you will see some interesting blog posts from others with the science21 tag coming out over the next few weeks and months. A couple of particular things I will try to follow up on;

  • Harry Collins spoke about categorisations of tacit (i.e. non-communicated) knowledge and how these relate to different categories of expertise. This has obvious implications for our mission to describe our experiments to a level where there is ‘no insider information’. The idea that we may be able to rationally describe what we can and cannot expect to be able to communicate and that we can therefore concentrate on the things that we can is compelling.
  • Greg Wilson made a strong case for the fully supported experiment that echoed my own thoughts about the recording of data analysis procedures. He was focussed on computational science but I think his point goes much wider than that. This requires some thought and processing but for me it is clear that the big challenge in communicating the details of our experiments now clearly lies in communicating process rather than data.

Each of these deserves its own post and will hopefully get it. And I am also aware that I owe many of you comments, replies, or other things – some more urgent than others. I’ll be getting to them as soon as I can dig myself out from under this pile of……

Posted on

The Open Science Endurance Event – Team JC-C

So far we’ve had a fun week. Jean-Claude arrived in the UK on Thursday last, followed up with a talk at Bath University to people at UKOLN on Friday. The talk kicked off an extended conversation which meant we were very late to lunch but it was great to follow up on issues from a different perspective to that. Jean-Claude will be making a screencast of the talk available on his Drexel-CoAs Podcast blog.

On Friday afternoon we headed into London in preparation for Science Blogging 2008 which was a blast. A very entertaining keynote by Ben Goldacre of Bad Science was followed up by a fascinating series of sessions on everything from Open Notebooks to connecting up conversations separated in time and space to creativity, blogging boredom, and unicycling giraffes. The sessions were great fun and there was lots of back chat on friendfeed but in many ways the best part of this for me was the chance to meet people (if in many cases very briefly) that I knew well but had never actually met in person. Too many to mention all but in particular it was a pleasure to finally meet Michael Barton, Richard Grant, Heather Etchevers, Matt Wood, Graham Steel, and many people from NPG as well as to meet many old friends. There is pretty good coverage of the meeting itself so I will simply point at the technorati tag and be done with that.

I was one of the people on the final panel with Peter Murray-Rust, Richard Grant, and moderation from Timo Hannay. This was a fun conversation with lots of different perspectives. I think the overall conclusion was that the idea that ‘blogging is bad for your career’ is shifting towards ‘why do you put all this work in?’ There was a strong sense that some people had made real personal gains out of blogging and online activities and that many organisations are starting to see it as a valuable contribution. Nonetheless it is not an activity that is widely valued, or indeed even known about. To this end the panel offered a challenge – to persuade a senior scientist to start writing a blog. One prize will be to be featured in next year’s Open Lab 2008 – the best of science writing on the web. The other prize – which caused an extensive collective intake of breath – will be an all expenses paid trip to Scifoo next year for both blogger and the encourager. The announcement will probably be made with details by the time I get to post this.

In the pub on the Saturday night, Peter M-R grabbed me and JC and Egon Willighagen and said ‘why don’t you come up to Cambridge tomorrow?’ So we all did and I and Egon have written briefly about that already. More work to do, and some interesting things to discuss, which I hope to follow up later.

Sunday afternoon- dash back to Southampton for the introductory dinner for the Open Science Workshop held at Southampton Uni on Monday. This was a really great meeting from my perspective with a real mix of tools people and ‘practicing’ scientists, computer scientists, chemists, biologists, and people with business degrees. There is more at the Wiki and on Friendfeed – but this will need a write up of its own. Hopefully slides will be made available for most of the talks and we will point to them from both Wiki and Friendfeed.

Tuesday, more meetings and planning, with a great meeting with Dave De Roure of Southampton Electronics and Computer Science and in particular the PI for the MyExperiment project.  Some good stuff will come out of this – and the contact between Dave and Chemspider has been made. The MyExperiment team are keen on delivering more for chemistry so that link will be important. However I was particularly taken with a throw away comment Dave made that workflows (and makefiles) have a direct equivalence with spreadsheets. This made me think immediately of that great divide between ‘those who use excel for everything’ and ‘those who run screaming in the other direction and would rather hard code in perl on a clay tablet’ for analysis. If we could actually leverage the vast number of analytical spread sheets sitting on a million hard drives we might be able to do some very interesting stuff. Hopefully more on this in a future post.

Wednesday we did some experiments – its mostly up online now so you can go see if you are interested. And today we are heading up to London to see the folks at Nature Publishing Group which should be fun. More opportunity to talk in detail about ideas from Saturday and the role of the publisher and papers in the future.  Had a lovely lunch with the NPG web publishing people, talks seemed to go reasonably well, and a quick chat with the people from Nature Chemistry

But it doesn’t stop there. Tomorrow JC goes to Manchester to give a talk, then heads to Edinburgh for the e-Science All Hands Meeting, including a workshop on ‘The Global Data Centric View’. Then he heads to Oxford for another meeting  and talk before finally heading back to Philadelphia. On Sunday I fly to Toronto, with a Nature Network pub session on the Sunday evening (wow I am going to be on scintillating form for that!) followed by Science in the 21st Century for the following week.

I think we are going to need a rest when we get to our respective homes again…

Posted on

More on the science exchance – or building and capitalising a data commons

Image from Wikipedia via ZemantaBanknotes from all around the World donated by visitors to the British Museum, London

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 fund the universities to do science, fund the journals to buy science; then the system would reward increased efficiency.

There is a problem at the core of this. For someone to pay for access to the results, there has to be a monetary benefit to them. This may be through increased efficiency of their research funding but that’s a rather vague benefit. For a serious charitable or commercial funder there has to be the potential to either make money, or at least see that the enterprise could become self sufficient. But surely this means monetizing the data somehow? Which would require restrictive licences, which is not at the end what we’re about.

The other story of the week has been the, in the end very useful, kerfuffle caused by ChemSpider moving to a CC-BY-SA licence, and the confusion that has been revealed regarding data, licencing, and the public domain. John Wilbanks, whose comments on the ChemSpider licence, sparked the discussion has written two posts [1, 2] which I found illuminating and have made things much clearer for me. His point is that data naturally belongs in the public domain and that the public domain and the freedom of the data itself needs to be protected from erosion, both legal, and conceptual that could be caused by our obsession with licences. What does this mean for making an effective data commons, and the Science Exchange that could arise from it, financially viable? Continue reading “More on the science exchance – or building and capitalising a data commons”

Posted on

The economic case for Open Science

I am thinking about how to present the case for Open Science, Open Notebook Science, and Open Data at Science in the 21st Century, the meeting being organised by Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I’ve put up a draft abstract and as you might guess from this I wanted to make an economic case that the waste of resources, both human and monetary is not something that is sustainable for the future. Here I want to rehearse that argument a bit further as well as explore the business case that could be presented to Google/Gates Foundation as a package that would include the development of the Science Exchange ideas that I blogged about last week. Continue reading “The economic case for Open Science”

Posted on

Science in the 21st Century

Perimiter InstitutePerimeter Institute by hungryhungrypixels (Picture found by Zemanta).

Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics are organising a conference called ‘Science in the 21st Century‘ which was inspired in part by SciBarCamp. I am honoured, and not a little daunted, to have been asked to speak considering the star studded line up of speakers including, well lots of really interesting people, read the list. The meeting looks to be a really interesting mix of science, tools, and how these interact with people (and scientists). I’m looking forward to it. Continue reading “Science in the 21st Century”