World Association of Young Scientists

''This is the content of the session's Etherpad as of this version, pasted as the session ends.''

This pad serves as a notepad for the Science 2.0 session at the Eurodoc 2010 conference:
http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0ASQvcnWHnwgmZGR3aHFkNmtfMjY0c210... .
Some of the planning takes place at http://ff.im/gaWDe .

The text in this document is synchronized as you type, so that everyone viewing this page sees the same text. You do not have to log in to type here, though providing your name in the top right box would be nice.

Please do not edit above the line of "=" but feel free to take notes below it. To pose questions, please use the chat on the right or a Twitter message tagged with #eurodoc2010 . Comments on the individual items in the pad should be placed directly below them, preceded by "Comment:".
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Warm-up:

Australian Leadership Awards Scholarships-Applications for the 2011 intake open on 10 March 2010 and close on 30 June 2010

The Australian Leadership Awards (ALA) aim to develop leadership and build partnerships and linkages within the Asia-Pacific, while addressing priority development issues of the region.

The ALA program comprises ALA Scholarships and ALA Fellowships. These awards are for leaders or those who have potential for leadership roles that can influence social and economic reform, both in their own countries and in the Asia-Pacific region.

ALA Scholarships are for study at Masters or Doctorate level in an Australian university. Study programs must relate to a priority development area: disability, economic growth, education, environment, food security, gender, governance, health, human rights, infrastructure, regional stability, rural development, water and sanitation. ALA scholars also undertake a Leadership Development Program in Australia.

Eurodoc2010 - Details on the conference and the session itself are available via the session's web page. Most of the session will make use of an Etherpad-based clickstream (embedded below) but there will also be some slides, embedded further below, and a discussion group at Friendfeed, embedded at the bottom of this page.

Abstract entiitled "Nanotechnology for Sustainable Environment" is accepted for TWAS/BioVisionAlexandria.NXT, Egypt. Thanks to Heba for posting event on WAYS. Detail is at the following link: http://www.ways.org/en/events/what_is_twasbiovisionalexandrianxt

such is the title (roughly: "Research today - collaboratively, it works better") of a talk I am going to give in Munich tomorrow at a workshop on networking amongst young researchers in Germany. My presentation is embedded below. It can be annotated here.

I think that awards should start to recognize that research is a collaborative endeavour and not always single out individuals. At the Early Career Stage that this award targets, it is practically impossible to differentiate between the top 10% (or so) of candidates -- what criteria would you use when the only simple metrics available are at the level of journals and articles and most of the few pieces published in there have been the work of many, including the candidate? Web-native metrics like karma systems (e.g.

Back in November, there was the abstract submission deadline for the 2010 Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE), and I had submitted a contribution entitled "What if science were sustainable?", promising to keep track of all further developments under the "ISEE-2010-sustainable-science" tag.

So here we go, the notification of acceptance just came in, containing these details on the review procedure:

The international response to the call for papers was overwhelming. We received about 1300 abstracts from 1100 registered submitters in 89 countries, with a generally very high quality. All abstracts have been evaluated and graded independently and anonymously by at least two members of our international review committee consisting of 96 reviewers. Abstracts have been allotted to reviewers on a random basis within the respective thematic foci. We will list all names of our review panel on our website. Based on the grades that we received for each abstract from our reviewers, we calculated an average grade for every abstract, and then ranked all abstracts accordingly. In cases where the span between two review results was significant a third review was collected. Double submissions were rejected. Most reviewers added comments to their reviews that can be accessed through the ConfTool system at https://www.conftool.com/isee2010.

Via that ConfTool, I could indeed find the reviewer's reports, which I copy-pasted below (with thanks to the reviewers), in the spirit of promoting public peer review practices (a screenshot with the nicer original layout is attached):

The following are the slightly redacted notes taken during a phone conversation this morning between Janet Haven and me on ways in which the Open Society Institute's Information Initiative could support Open Science.

Background to this conversation:
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information and
http://ways.org/en/node/17356 - thanks for all the comments received so far!

JH (per email):
We'd like to ask you to think about two to three emerging opportunities for--or threats to--open society institutions and values that you are aware of which are not receiving sufficient attention and where a funder like OSI could usefully intervene. We encourage you to suggest issues that are still very much on the horizon; there need not be an obvious solution to the points you raise.

DM (in blog post mentioned above):
- support open collaborative environments for research funding, research, and knowledge structuring (see post and discussion at http://ff.im/gpry3 )
- support science prizes/ competitions for research done in the open (see http://ff.im/gpry3 ), or specific scientists/ labs working in the open (possibly part-time on "open", part-time on "science")
- promote diversification of the measures used to assess the impact of a researcher - http://ff.im/ghGML and http://ff.im/gvfKg
- support a test of the efficiency of non-public peer review - http://ff.im/gvfKg and

Today, I received an email from the Open Society Institute's Information Initiative:

We'd like to ask you to think about two to three emerging opportunities for--or threats to--open society institutions and values that you are aware of which are not receiving sufficient attention and where a funder like OSI could usefully intervene. We encourage you to suggest issues that are still very much on the horizon; there need not be an obvious solution to the points you raise.

I know that the OSI had and has many interesting projects running (also in regions and cultures normally off the radar, including some of those dear to me) but I have often (not just jokingly) taken its abbreviation to stand for "Open Science Institute", and so I take the liberty here to shrink the space of possible replies by concentrating on openness in science, anyway the most prominent topic in my blog.

My intuitive response would be that several inefficiencies in our current knowledge creation and curation systems cry for a test run of open approaches. Not sure whether I can distill this down to three issues, but let's get started by listing some of the ideas, and I hope that you can then help me structure and adapt them appropriately. To facilitate the discussion, I will resort to Cameron's depiction of the research cycle:

Join via live stream today: The Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest

It starts at 9:30 PST and features talks by the following speakers (schedule here):

Stephen Friend - Founder and President of Sage, a non-profit research organization that’s revolutionizing how researchers approach the treatment of disease

Peter Binfield – Publisher of PLoS ONE, an innovative online scientific journal and influencial leader of the open access movement

i have come to think of sebaceous gland secretions and sweat as strong anti fungals from the fact that sweating soles of feet never get Tinea capitis yet also faces with acne rarely get ringworm, anyway it is just a plain observation so i need more research about it

Tomorrow, a parliamentarian resolution will be submitted in Iceland in order to turn the country into a model for freedom of expression on the Internet. Far away from the conservative vision displayed by many confused governments who try to control freedom of communication on the Net through "three strikes", Internet blocking or the ACTA, this would be a historic event. La Quadrature du Net supports this project and congratulates the coalition of Icelandic Parliamentarians at the origin of the initiative.

Following up on last night's demo of a paper-turned-into-wiki-article, I am adding below a pictorial summary of some of the key issues. The comments are meant to apply to a typical paper, not necessarily just this one or other papers in this journal.

First, let's take a look at the anatomy of the paper in its native state (typically pdf, often HTML, rarely XML or other machine-readable formats).

While 140-character summaries of scientific papers seem to be the topic of today in some parts of my feedsphere (#sci140), I wish to get back to another way of making publications shorter and more efficient, as has been discussed before in various circumstances, e.g. under the label of micropublication.

Let me start by requoting John Wilbanks:

Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It’s just a highly inefficient one -- the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper.

In this spirit, I have taken one of my articles whose licenses permit reuse and modifications and turned its abstract and introduction into a demo on how publishing in a wiki-style environment may look like.

TWOWS Prizes: Call for nominations

TWOWS is now accepting nominations of excellent young women scientists from throughout the developing world. Deadline is 28 February 2010.

http://www.twas.org/ then follow Home → News Folder → TWOWS Prizes: Call for nominations