open science
clock | August 21, 2009Yesterday PLoS and Google unveiled PLoS Currents: Influenza, a Google Knol hosted collection of rapid communications about the swine flu.
In his blog post A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research (also posted on the official Google blog), Dr.Harold Varmus explains:
The key goal of PLoS Currents is to accelerate scientific discovery by allowing researchers to share their latest findings and ideas immediately with the world's scientific and medical communities. Google Knol's features for community interaction, comment and discussion will enable commentary and conversations to…
clock | August 19, 2009Talk given by Peter Binfield at the ISMTE meeting (slides and audio):
The Future of Online (Academic) Publishing - Presentation to the ISMTE August 2009
Tags: journals academic publishing STM online publishing PLoS PLoS ONE article level metrics
clock | August 18, 2009Two recent events put in stark relief the differences between the old way of doing things and the new way of doing things. What am I talking about? The changing world of science publishing, of course.
Let me introduce the two examples first, and make some of my comments at the end.
Example 1. Publishing a Comment about a journal article
My SciBling Steinn brought to our collective attention a horrific case of a scientist who spent a year fighting against the editors of a journal, trying to have a Comment published about a paper that was, in his view, erroneous (for the sake of the argument it…
clock | August 15, 2009A run-down of good recent stuff, highly recommended for your weekend reading and bookmarking:
PLoS One: Interview with Peter Binfield:
...In my view PLoS ONE is the most dynamic, innovative and exciting journal in the world, and I am proud to work on it.
In many ways PLoS ONE operates like any other journal however it diverges in several important respects. The founding principle of PLoS ONE was that there are certain aspects of publishing which are best conducted pre-publication and certain aspects which are best conducted post-publication. The advent of online publishing has allowed us to…
clock | August 14, 2009Science Online London is next week. I really wanted to go this year, but hard choices had to be made....eh, well.
For those of you who, like me, cannot be there in person, there are plenty of ways to follow the meeting virtually. Follow @soloconf and the #solo09 hashtag on Twitter. Join the FriendFeed room. Check out the Facebook page. And of course there will be a lot of blogging, including in the Forums at Nature Network.
And for those of you who have computers with enough power and good graphics cards, another option is to follow the conference in Second Life - check that link to see how.
clock | August 14, 2009Making the Web Work for Science - Full from Jordan Mendelson on Vimeo.
From left to right: Tim O'Reilly, Jimmy Wales, Stephen Friend and John Wilbanks - via Jonathan (there is also a shorter summary version here)
clock | August 4, 2009Ginny Barbour, Part 5: Open Access, Achievements and Looking Forward from PLoS on Vimeo.
clock | August 3, 2009Ginny Barbour, Part 4: PLoS Medicine's Fifth Anniversary and Future Plans from PLoS on Vimeo.
cpikas | August 2, 2009A quick note on the tension between sharing everything as quickly as possible and keeping things for yourself.
The thrill of collaboration when like minds come together to brainstorm and solve big problems and the egoboo of having something you created "liked" or reused should not exclude or overshadow the value of figuring things out for yourself and having something you can point to as your own.
Recent posts from Sabine and Cameron got me thinking about this a little more. There are also some excellent comments on Sabine's post.
I think it's important to go offline for a bit and to work…
clock | August 2, 2009Ginny Barbour, Part 3: PLoS Medicine Open Access to Health Information from PLoS on Vimeo.
clock | July 31, 2009A few weeks ago in Lindau, Lars Fischer (remember his guest post here?) sat me down with the digital audio recorder and conducted an interview - we talked for about an hour about Open Access, future of scientific publishing/papers/communication, etc.
The article based on that interview is now online - you can read it here, but only if you can read German. Then you can tell me what is it that I actually said ;-)
Update: the translation is now here.
Update 2: The entire transcript is now available online/
pontiff | July 29, 2009Since it seems that the "arXiv on your hard drive" is dead I've been thinking a bit about if there is a better way to achieve the goal of distributing archives of the arXiv.
One thing I liked about the "arXiv on your hard drive" was that it used BitTorrent. This could alleviate some of the bandwidth pain associated with distributing the arXiv widely. But of course, one of the problems with using Torrents to distribute the arXiv is that, well, the arXiv changes daily! One solution to this is to update the torrent periodically, but in these go-go times this seems wrong. It seems to me that…
clock | July 27, 2009Open Access and the divide between 'mainstream' and 'peripheral' science (also available here and here) by Jean-Claude Guédon is a Must Read of the day. Anyone have his contact info so I can see if he would come to ScienceOnline'10?
There is a whole bunch of articles about science publication metrics in the latest ESEP THEME SECTION - The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance. Well worth studying. On article-level metrics, there are some interesting reactions in the blogosphere, by Deepak Singh, Bjoern Brembs, Duncan Hull, Bill Hooker and Abhishek Tiwari…
clock | July 22, 2009Everyone and their grandmother knows that Impact Factor is a crude, unreliable and just wrong metric to use in evaluating individuals for career-making (or career-breaking) purposes. Yet, so many institutions (or rather, their bureaucrats - scientists would abandon it if their bosses would) cling to IF anyway. Probably because nobody has pushed for a good alternative yet. In the world of science publishing, when something needs to be done, usually people look at us (that is: PLoS) to make the first move. The beauty of being a path-blazer!
So, in today's post 'PLoS Journals - measuring impact…
clock | July 10, 2009As you know, I gave two lectures here in Belgrade. The first one, at the University Library on Monday, and the second one at the Oncology Institute of the School of Medicine at the University of Belgrade. As the two audiences were different (mainly librarians/infoscientists at the first, mainly professors/students of medicine at the second) I geared the two talks differently.
You can listen to the audio of the entire thing (the second talk) here, see some pictures (from both talks) here and read (in Serbian) a blog post here, written by incredible Ana Ivkovic who organized my entire Belgrade…
pontiff | July 8, 2009The arXiv is a game changer for how large portions of physics (and increasingly other fields) are done. Paul Ginsparg won a MacArthur award for his vision and stewardship of the arXiv (something other institutions might want to note when they decide that someone trying to change how science is done isn't really doing work that will impact them.) So...Given: The arXiv is great. But there is something that's always bothered me a bit about the arXiv: transparency.
(Note: those of you who wish to complain about the fact that you can't get endorsed on the arXiv, this article is not for you.…
clock | July 5, 2009As I was traveling, I only briefly mentioned the brand new and exciting paleontology paper in PLoS ONE - New Mid-Cretaceous (Latest Albian) Dinosaurs from Winton, Queensland, Australia that was published on Thursday. Bex has written an introduction and will post a Media/Blog coverage (of which there was a lot!) summary probably tomorrow.
The fossils were discovered, cleaned and analyzed by the Australian Age Of Dinosaurs non-profit organization, with a help of thousands of volunteers - the 'citizen scientists'. You can learn more from their press release.
The importance of the publication of…
clock | June 28, 2009This is a repost of an November 6, 2007 post (as always, click on the icon to see the original and its comments):
Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry.
But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put…
clock | June 28, 2009A repost of a November 28, 2008 post:
The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally.
Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It…