open science

Science 2.0 - what's up?

daniel — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:31:18 -0400

This is what has recently been discussed in the science 2.0 room at friendfeed. Feedback welcome!

Creative Commons - you can participate in the creation of a globally shared cultural heritage

daniel — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:14:29 -0400

This video released by Creative Commons explains how you can contribute to a global cultural heritage and at the same time exercise copyrights to have a say on how your contributions live on when taken up by others.

Open Access is an important step on the way towards open science

daniel — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:06:35 -0400

This post is meant as a contribution to Open Access Day (OA day) which strives to raise awareness - amongst researchers, research funders, academic publishers, students, politicians and the public - of the importance of Open Access (to literature containing peer-reviewed results of scientific investigations, that is) for our global society.

One way to do this is to have people like you blog in synchronization, i.e. on four questions during OA day. To give you some inspiration on the topic, you may wish to take a look at the first such synch-blogging entry, which came from Neil Saunders, based at the University of Queensland, Australia.

I will follow Neil's formatting to address the four questions:

Why does Open Access matter to you?

OA, for me, marks a turning point within the scientific cycle, i.e. the iterative process which leads (if sufficiently funded) from a research question or idea to a hypothesis or new method that can be tested and, ultimately, to the results of those tests which then have to be communicated. This communication step is crucial, as it adds to our global knowledge foundation (often described, following Newton, as "the shoulders of giants") for new research questions or ideas that may eventually lead to things like "innovation", "insight" and "progress". If innovators-to-be, however, do not have access to the findings of their forebears (which may indeed be contemporaries), they will have to spend a lot of their time and resources by (re)inventing some aspects of the giants' shoulders before starting to work on their innovations in the first place. Open Access is a movement to lift those access barriers, and it is not only useful to researchers but it can also, for instance, help patients and their relatives to gather first-hand expert information on their specific health conditions, and it can help to inform public debates about research data with scientific implications. The full power of Open Access, however, can only be harvested if all other steps within the scientific cycle (including, e.g., notebook keeping) also become increasingly open, a goal with multiple names (of which Open Science is my favourite). This would not only reduce the considerable time lag between the obtainment of some results and their application in other circumstances but also foster the development of new citation metrics that would allow to more adequately evaluate the research accomplishments of young scientists.

How did you first become aware of it?

I had been aware of the barriers since I started reading scientific papers in the mid-1990s, as I rarely had access to much of the literature cited therein, no matter what library I went to (and I went to more than a dozen regularly at that time). I got a glimpse of a possible solution when checking out the freely available content at BioMed Central on a weekly basis some years later but this again did not cover much of my core areas of interest (Evolutionary Biophysics), nor did arxiv.org that I had discovered around the same time. So it took the Budapest Open Access Initiative to make me aware of the progress that had already been achieved or was underway by 2001, and I signed it shortly after starting to work on my PhD thesis.

Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?

Knowledge grows when shared. And what else is the goal of research if not growing knowledge on a global scale? Besides, I find it non-sustainable to use the limited resources that we have to constantly re-invent the wheel for reasons external to the research process.

What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

As an author, I strive to publish OA (i.e. gold) but independent of whether this is possible or not, I self-archive my papers (i.e. green OA). I am neither a journal editor nor part of a publishing house but I occasionally use my blog to cover OA and related topics, particularly Open Education, and Open Science as a whole, and I link to ot he r s who do this more intensively. Finally, I am playing around with plat form s and techn olo gie s that may facilitate the transition to a more open scientific cycle, keeping a special eye on what these upcoming changes might mean to young scientists, e.g. in terms of theses and online le ctures rather than papers. Others can, of course, familiarize themselves with the issue of effectively (in both time and resources) communicating (peer-reviewed) research results via the channels that are technically possible, they can experiment with the to ol s at hand to communicate their thoughts, and they can educate even more others about these matters in more traditional ways. In fact, I think they should.

Open Access Day tomorrow, Oct 14, 2008

daniel — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:28:55 -0400

Stay tuned via
http://openaccessday.org/ or
http://friendfeed.com/rooms/open-access-day .

How to blog science

daniel — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:38:54 -0400

SciDev, always a good source of information on science and development, recently posted a blog entry "How to set up a science blog" which may be of interest here, too, even though, at WAYS, you do not have to set up your own blog (it's all been done already, and you can start typing write away). The SciDev post also offers advice on what to blog and how, how often and how to generate discussion. Enjoy and feel free to use your WAYS blog for your first steps in science blogging!

As for blogging in the developing world, they mention the following: "Jonathan Gosier, a software developer living in Kampala, Uganda, describes blogging from a developing country as "a lesson in patience, endurance and ingenuity". On his blog on Apprifca he recommends ten applications that can ease the challenges of dealing with power cuts, unstable Internet connections and potential data loss."

Like much of the contents at SciDev, this post is also available in Chinese: 如何建立科学博客 .

Web 2.0 tools for scientists

daniel — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:24:30 -0400

WAYS is a pretty interactive website (i.e. you can both consume and generate contents in various medias, a concept commonly referred to as Web 2.0) but if you are not sure what all these new tools can do for you as a scientist, you may wish to take a look at the Small Worlds project hosted at the University of Leicester.

Science and research blogging

daniel — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:48:12 -0400

"Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy" - such is the title of an article recently published in the Open Access journal PLoS Biology.

In this article, blogging features prominently, and to add practical expericnce to academic discourse, one of the authors, Nicholas J. Anthis, has commented on the major ideas of the paper in his blog, as did John Dennehy (not involved in the paper) in his blog. Both also posted their blog entries to the platform researchblogging.org that aggregates blogs on the contents of peer-reviewed research papers.

Most of the blogs at researchblogging are in English but contributions in other languages are also possible.

Corpus callosum - a new bulletin on Open science matters

daniel — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:45:51 -0400

The first issue of an open science round-up, quite appropriately named "Corpus callosum" (after the brain structure responsible for most of the connections between our cerebral hemispheres), just went online on the blog of Shirley Wu.

Open science featured in Boston Globe article

daniel — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:12:28 -0400

The Boston Globe recently published an article on the spreading of open science activities.

Journal of Visualized experiments - a new way to teach biological subjects

daniel — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:25:22 -0400

This note is meant to make you aware of the Journal of Visualized Experiments - a peer reviewed online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a freely accessible video format.