In a few hours I will be giving a short presentation to the whole of the PSB conference on the workshop that we ran on Monday. We are still thinking through the details of what has come out of this and hopefully the discussion will continue in any case so this is a personal view. The slides for the presentation are available at Slideshare. To me there were a couple of key points that came out.

Just a very brief rundown of what happened at the workshop this morning and some central themes that came out of it. The slides from the talks are available on Slideshare and recorded video from most of the talks (unfortunately not Dave de Roure‘s or Phil Bourne‘s at the moment) is available on my Mogulus channel (http://www.mogulus.com/cameron_neylon – click on Video on Demand and select the PSB folder). The commentary from the conference is

As I noted in the last post we are rapidly counting down towards the final few days before the Open Science Workshop at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. I am flying out from Sydney to Hawaii this afternoon and may or may not have network connectivity in the days leading up the meeting. So just some quick notes here on where you can find any final information if you are coming or if you want to follow online.

All good traditions require someone to make an arbitrary decision to do something again. Last year I threw up a few New Year’s resolutions in the hours before NYE in the UK. Last night I was out on the shore of Sydney Harbour. I had the laptop – I thought about writing something – and then I thought – nah I can just lie here and look at the pretty lights.

Coming from me that may sound a strange title, but while I am very positive about the potential for online tools to improve the way we communicate science, I sometimes despair about the irritating little barriers that constantly prevent us from starting to achieve what we might. Today I had a good example of that. Currently I am in Sydney, a city where many old, and some not so old friends live.

Yesterday on the train I had a most remarkable experience of synchronicity. I had been at the RIN workshop on the costs of scholarly publishing (more on that later) in London and was heading of to Oxford for a group dinner. On the train I was looking for a seat with a desk and took one up opposite a guy with a slightly battered looking mac laptop.

We are in the slow process of gearing up within my group at RAL to adopting the Chemtools LaBLog system and in the process moving properly to an Open Notebook status. This has taken much longer than I had hoped but there have been some interesting lessons along the way. Here I want to think a bit about a problem that has been troubling me for a while.

Just a quick note from the IDCC given I was introduced as “one of those people who are probably blogging the conference”. I spoke this morning giving a talk on Radical Sharing – Transforming Science? A version of the slides is available at slideshare. It seemed to go reasonably well and I got some positive comments.

I just wanted to point to a post that Tim O’Reilly wrote just before the US election a few weeks back. There was an interesting discussion about the rights and wrongs of him posting on his political views and the rights and wrongs of that being linked to from the O’Reilly Media front page. In amongst the abuse that you have come to expect in public political discussions there is some thought provoking stuff.

Following my hopefully getting towards three-quarters baked post there has been more helpful comments and discussion both here and on friendfeed. I wanted to pick out a specific issue that has come up in both places. At Friendfeed the discussion ran into the question of plagiarism more generally and why it is bad.

So while on the train yesterday in somewhat pre-caffeinated state I stuck my foot in it somewhat. Several others have written (Nils Reinton, Bill Hooker, Jon Eisen, Hsien-Hsien Lei, Shirley Wu) on the unattributed use of an image that was put together by Ricardo Vidal for the DNA Network of blogs. The company that did this are selling hokum. No question of that.