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:

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.

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

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

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.

The following is a reply to "On Citizendium", whose comment forms didn't accept me pasting in this comment from my text editor.

Thanks for the constructive feedback. Several points I wish to add:

• Real names are necessary at some point, since they provide a simple and time-honoured way to deal with the situation that "What hasn't kept pace with the technical innovation is the recognition that people need to engage in civil dialogue."
• The only articles about whose quality Citizendium makes any claim are Approved Articles. Currently, there are 121 of these. Yes, this is a very small number, largely due to (1) the small number of active contributors and (2) the complicated approval system, streamlining of which has long been on the agenda, but didn't proceed much because of (1), though we actually have discussed the combination of FlaggedRevisions with expertise as a possible solution. For all non-approved articles, no statement on the quality is made, but the real name requirement keeps vandalism fairly well at bay.
• Real names and Approved Articles are just some of the differentiators. Others include the use of subpages to structure information pertaining to an article's topic (e.g. Related Articles, which essentially replace categories for navigation).
• Larry has announced repeatedly that he will step down as Editor-in-Chief, and a Citizendium Charter is currently being drafted, according to which the project shall develop after this transition. In its current version, it covers aspects like dispute resolution, partnering with external organizations, and integration with teaching and research (activities by sizable communities for which the reliability aspect is essential). Comments very welcome.

                                              "It's not information overload, it's filter failure." (Clay Shirky)

Two weeks ago, I invited suggestions as to what may have been the breakthrough of the year in open science. On the basis of the candidates that came up (plus a few that I had on my own list), a poll was then set up for everyone to vote their preferences by ranking the following candidates (listed in random order, as in the poll, but this time with links):

Two weeks ago, I invited suggestions as to what may have been the breakthrough of the year in open science. On the basis of the candidates that came up (plus a few that I had on my own list), a poll was then set up for everyone to vote their preferences amongst the following candidates (presented in random order):

As the end of the year is nearing, many collections suffixed "of the year" are about to emerge. I am not particularly enthusiastic about these but since I haven't yet seen any in which open science activities featured prominently, I thought targeting them may well be worth a try. So what are your candidates for the breakthrough of the year in open science?

I endow every commenter here and in the accompanying Friendfeed thread (embedded below) with seven points to distribute (in positive integer units, plus optionally once "-1") across up to seven different achievements or events. Please also provide at least a twenty-word statement and a link for each item you honoured with points. Voting will start now and end at 7pm UTC on Dec 16.

I have my own favourites but in the interest of not spoiling the party, I will announce them in the comment to the results.

This is the second of two parts of a guest post for the Euroscientist, the blog of Euroscience.org. Part I can be found here.

Part II: What would knowledge structuring look like if it were invented today?

 read more »

This is a response to http://www.wittylama.com/2009/09/wikipedia-journal/ - a new (still hypothetical) initiative consisting of an Open Access journal (with ISSN and CC license) that publishes scholarly reviews that are peer-reviewed and ready to be pasted into Wikipedia.

I like this idea a lot. It is much like Scholarpedia (which contains commissioned but anonymously peer-reviewed articles and which has an ISSN but no coherent license), just has a broader scope and does not confine itself to the top-notch experts in the field. Your proposal, as mentioned above, also bears some resemblance to Citizendium (where the review process usually involves domain generalists rather than topic specialists, and it is non-anonymous; has CC license but no ISSN). Both operate stable versions that can be updated. The former allows for attribution, the latter not.

You also mentioned that a similar journal could be set up for original research (something that the Wikipedias, but also Scholarpedia and Citizendium have avoided so far), and in this regard, it is very close to the journal PLoS ONE (meant to be for all scientific disciplines, though currently with a bias towards the biomedical fields; has ISSN and CC license) and the recently launched PLoS Currents (which, in essence, uses Knol as a preprint server), which I have commented here.

I am also currently drafting a blog post for the Euroscientist on these matters at Wikiversity, to which everzone is welcome to contribute and where a number of related posts is referenced. To quote from just one of them: "science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It's just a really, really inefficient one - the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate the existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one-to-three new assertions made in any one paper."