Some months ago now I gave a talk at very exciting symposium organized by Greg Wilson as a closer for the Software Carpentry course he was running at Toronto University. It was exciting because of the lineup but also because it represented a real coming together of views on how developments in computer science and infrastructure as well as new social capabilities brought about by computer networks are changing scientific research.I talked, as I have several times recently, about the idea of a web-native laboratory record, thinking about what the paper notebook would look like if …

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 …

Interesting conversation yesterday on Twitter with Evgeniy Meyke of EarthCape prompted in part by my last post. We started talking about what a Friendfeed replacement might look like and how it might integrate more directly into scientific data. Is it possible to build something general or will it always need to be domain specific. Might this in fact be an advantage? Evgeniy asked:
@CameronNeylon do you think that “something new” could be more vertically oriented rather then for “research community” in general?
His thinking being, as I understand it that to get …

…is that someone needs to make money out of them. It was inevitable at some point that Friendfeed would take a route that lead it towards mass adoption and away from the needs of the (rather small) community of researchers that have found a niche that works well for them. I had thought it more likely that Friendfeed would gradually move away from the aspects that researchers found attractive rather than being absorbed wholesale by a bigger player but then I don’t know much about how Silicon Valley really works. …

Last Friday afternoon (was it really only a week ago?) about 200 people made their way to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the fourth SciFoo. There are many people who got their blog posts out well before me so I will focus on the sessions which don’t seem to have been heavily discussed and try to draw a few themes out.
For me, the over riding theme that came through was Engagement. Engaging people beyond the narrow confines of the professional research community in real research projects, making science more …

Yesterday I was privileged to be invited to give a talk at the NESTA Crucible Workshop being held in Lancaster. You can find the slides on slideshare. NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts,  is an interesting organization funded via a UK government endowment to support innovation and enterprise and more particularly the generation of a more innovative and entrepreneurial culture in the UK. Among the programmes it runs in pursuit of this is the Crucible program where a small group of young researchers, generally looking for …

Euan Adie has asked for some help to do further analysis on the comments made on PLoS ONE articles. He is doing this via crowd sourcing through a specially written app at appspot to get people to characterize all the comments in PLoS ONE. Euan is very good at putting these kind of things together and again this shows the power of Friendfeed as a way of getting the message out. Dividing the job up into bite sized chunks so people can help even with a little bit of time, …

The Research Information Network has put out a cal for expressions of interest in running a research project on how Web 2.0 tools are changing scientific practice. The project will be funded up to £90,000. Expressions of interest are due on Monday 3 November (yes next week) and the projects are due to start in January. You can see the call in full here but in outline RIN seeking evidence whether web 2.0 tools are:
• making data easier to share, verify and re-use, or otherwise
facilitating more open scientific practices;
• changing …

A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement:
I would add that in my opinion Cameron’s points about FriendFeed apply also to Nature Network. I’ve seen lots of examples of highly specific questions being answered on NN in the way Cameron describes for FF…But NN and FF aren’t the same: they both have the same nice feature of discussion of a partiular question or “article at …

So Ian Mulvaney asked, and as my solution did not fit into the margin I thought I would post here. Following on from the two rants of a few weeks back and many discussions at Scifoo I have been thinking about how scientists might be persuaded to make more use of social web based tools. What does it take to get enough people involved so that the network effects become apparent. I had a discussion with Jamie Heywood of Patients Like Me at Scifoo because I was interested as to …