World Association of Young Scientists

From June 14-25, an unusual event of science engagement took place online, which brought over 5000 school kids and 100 scientists together for chats and Q&A sessions on science and how life is like as a scientist: "I'm a Scientist". To get a flavour of these questions (of which over 7000 were asked in total), a few of them are displayed below (in original spelling):

Last November, I submitted a conference abstract entitled "What if science were sustainable?" to the 2010 Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE).

Starting this week, I have been part of "I'm a Scientist — Get me out of here", a very interesting science communication experiment, in which 8000 school kids and 100 scientists meet online (in 20 different places) to discuss what science means for them, and what is important about that (I try to keep track of it here).

Later today, I will attend the Semantic Web Day in Leipzig and give a talk on Integrating wikis with scientific workflows. Perhaps appropriate to the topic, I did not prepare slides but a set of wiki pages.

The title of this post misrepresents the position of the Society for Scholarly Publishing just about as much as their recent blog post did with the publishing practice, standards and goals of the Public Library of Science, and their journal PLoS ONE in particular. There may be a grain of truth in this headline, though, in that the rising heat of the debate may indeed be indicative of a tipping point coming in sight, after which toll-access (i.e. subscription-based) scientific journals would shrink into a niche in the prelude to a larger disruption of the scientific communication process, the transition to open science.

For details, please take a look at the reply that PLoS posted yesterday, and at one of the discussions that spun off the original blog post (which is linked from there). Both are embedded below.

In the spirit of Another Conference I did not attend, I embed below my summary of tweets on OKCon 2010, as well as the piratepad that pleasantly fulfilled the function of collaborative note taking, for which I had proposed a wiki-based attempt yesterday. While the former is unbeatably interactive (one of the best ways to attend a conference online if no audio/video is available), I think that the latter is more suitable for long-term archiving and structuring the information about the conference and its sessions and talks. Looking forward to another Etherpad-based attempt at OpenSciNY.

Later today, OKCon 2010 will take place — the fifth (or fourth, depending on whether WSFII 2005 counts or not) installment of the Open Knowledge Conference, organized on an annual basis by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

I have contributed to a paper (with @Tom Morris, who will present it) that is scheduled for the Community-Driven Research session and describes Citizendium as a platform for the collaborative structuring of knowledge by experts and the public. I cannot attend in person but will do so online via Twitter and Friendfeed, and this blend of wiki and microblogging on the same topic stimulated me to give collaborative blogging another try, this time via the wiki entry on the conference, embedded below. Caveat: only registered users can edit, but everyone can register, and approval rarely takes more than a few hours. If this is too late for you to keep your OKCon 2010 notes there, then the wiki can still serve to structure them later and to contextualize them. Or it can simply link to your blog posts, images and other materials on the matter.

I am also aware that, as long as wikis do not allow parallel editing in the same sections of a document, Etherpad clones would be an alternative, and they may indeed get their try in a few weeks too.

Anyway, here we go for the wiki variant:

The British Library are currently running what they call a "Biomedical Research Information Support Survey", whose last question is number 31:

I do not think that discussing this supplementary question here would spoil the survey, so I invite possible answers, irrespective of whether you filled in the survey or not. I shall post a screenshot of my answer here tomorrow.

I couldn't attend CPOV 2010 in person but followed it via Twitter and took a number of screenshots, which I combined into this animation (3:10 min in total, at 0.5 frames per second). I also attached it as an animated gif at 1 frame per second but this may be just illustrative of information overflow.