Last Friday afternoon (was it really only a week ago?) about 200 people made their way to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the fourth SciFoo. There are many people who got their blog posts out well before me so I will focus on the sessions which don’t seem to have been heavily discussed and try to draw a few themes out. For me, the over riding theme that came through was Engagement.

Greg Wilson has put together an amazing set of speakers for a symposium entitled – “Science 2.0: What every scientist needs to know about how the web is changing the way they work“. It is very exciting for me to be sharing a platform with Michael Nielsen, Victoria Stodden, Titus Brown, David Rich and Jon Udell. The full details are available at the link. The event is free but you need to register in advance.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend both SciBarCamp Palo Alto and SciFoo; both for the second time. In the next few posts I will give a brief survey of the highlights of both, kicking off with SciBarCamp.

A couple of weeks ago there was a significant fracas over Daniel MacArthur‘s tweeting from a Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory meeting.Â

I am probably supposed to be writing up some weighty blog post on some issue of importance but this is much more fun. Last year’s International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) kicked off one of the first major live blogging exercises in a mainstream biology conference. It was so successful that the main instigators were invited to write up the exercise and the conference in a paper in PLoS Comp Biol.

Yesterday I was privileged to be invited to give a talk at the NESTA Crucible Workshop being held in Lancaster. You can find the slides on slideshare. NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts,Â

I think it is fair to say that even those of us most enamored of post-publication peer review would agree that its effectiveness remains to be demonstrated in a convincing fashion. Broadly speaking there are two reasons for this; the first is the problem of social norms for commenting. As in there aren’t any.

A few days ago the UK Government report on the future of Britain’s digital infrastructure, co-ordinated by Lord Carter, was released. I haven’t had time to read the whole report, I haven’t even really had time to skim it completely. But two things really leapt out at me. On page four: And on page 18: The first extract, is to me symptomatic of a serious, even catastrophic lack of ambition and understanding of how the web is changing.

In the previous post  I discussed a workflow using Wave to author and publish a paper. In this post I want to look at the possibility of using it as a laboratory record, or more specifically as a human interface to the laboratory record. There has been much work in recent years on research portals and Virtual Research Environments.

I, and many others have spent the last week thinking about Wave and I have to say that I am getting more, rather than less, excited about the possibilities that this represents. All of the below will have to remain speculation for the moment but I wanted to walk through two use cases and identify how the concept of a collaborative automated document will have an impact.

In a week or so’s time I have been invited to speak as part of a forward planning exercise at Elsevier. To some this may seem like an opportunity to go in for an all guns blazing OA rant or perhaps to plant some incendiary device but I see it more as opportunity to nudge, perhaps cajole, a big player in the area of scholarly publishing in the right direction.