World Association of Young Scientists

This blog is focused on science, simply because that is what I do most of my time. The same applies to the "What would [X] look like if it were invented today?" series of blog posts, and while it has not escaped my notice that X=Humanities would be a possible configuration, I did not feel particularly competent to write that part, nor did my infrequent calls for people from the humanities or social sciences to participate in the open science debates here or at Friendfeed result in much feedback from that end. However, I came across a piece recently (and read it today) that has a great potential to fill this gap (a case for UU, as discussed yesterday). It was written in a very personal and engaging style by Lisbet Rausing for a printed magazine (The New Republic), so its major drawback is that it has no hyperlinks and that the only non-text element is this image of a traditional library of paper documents. But the text was explicitly placed in the Public Domain, such that it can be adapted for the web, for which I have set up a document anyone can edit — please feel free to do so, and to tell your colleagues and friends in the humanities and social sciences about it.

For stimulation, I paste in below Lisbet Rausing's original of March 12, 2010 at 12:00 am, entitled "Toward a New Alexandria". The text (which should not be changed, though corrections may be added) is well worth a second read even in this non-enhanced form, and I will leave it to you to judge whether a more webby version can add value to that.

I have no precise idea what the environmental footprint of this blog is but I just saw mention here of a blog with about 15000 visits producing about 3.5kg of CO₂ per month and that there is an initiative dedicated to raising awareness on the issue and to planting trees in order to alleviate some of the impact. More on the initiative via the Friendfeed group dedicated to it:

 
In particular, I came across the Wellcome Trust's Strategic Plan 2010-20 and ICSU's Strategic Plan 2012-2017.

Furthermore, as a follow-up to our previous conversations, Janet Haven from the Open Society Institute's Information Initiative sent me some supplementary questions in relation to their strategy (in which open science may or may not play a role, but it is now kind of short-listed as a potential major strategic element), on which I will briefly reflect here before passing on the ball to you.

Finally, a major scientific society asked me for input about the likely advantages and drawbacks of allowing, as per default, all content of the scientific sessions of their conferences to be broadcast live in any medium, and whether it would be sensible to make this a standard requirement whenever they sign the contract with the organizers of an upcoming conference.

I find the last item a bit daunting for tonight, so I will just link to a blog post on a related discussion (that of how to signal which way of broadcasting a conference is OK) and invite your comments, so that, hopefully, I can send them a useful reply within a few days.

Some days ago, science funding made an important step towards arriving in the web era: Fundscience.org — a non-profit platform dedicated to opening up science funding to the eyes of the interested public — issued its first call for submissions of research proposals (deadline for submissions: April 1). Both the number of grants available in this first round (up to 3; yes, three) and their volume (up to US$ 50,000, or packages of 5,000 CPU cycles) are small in comparison to what established science funders have on offer but the call's conditions contain the seed of a new culture in science funding, one in which funding decisions are made less and less behind closed doors.

Yesterday was the deadline for submissions of "[p]roblems that, if solved, would advance the knowledge and capabilities in an area of your research". You can vote on them until Sunday, March 21 — two of the submitted problems will be turned into prizes (US$30k & 20k) for those coming up with a solution. My proposal (including the text contained in the supplementary file) is pasted in below:

Test the efficiency of public versus non-public peer review, both for research proposals and scholarly manuscripts. The results of this test would provide food for thought for the whole scientific community (which is based on non-public peer review) and the society at large (which ultimately pays the bills).

TWAS is now accepting applications for its postgraduate, postdoctoral, visiting scholars and advanced research fellowship programmes. The fellowships are offered to scientists from developing countries and are tenable at centres of excellence in various countries in the South, including Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan and Thailand. Eligible fields include: agricultural and biological sciences, medical and health sciences, chemistry, engineering, astronomy, space and earth sciences, mathematics and physics.

Please see www.twas.org > Programmes > Exchange for detail.

''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