Image via Wikipedia It has become reflexive in the Open Communities to talk about a need for “cultural change”. The obvious next step becomes to find strong and widely respected advocates of change, to evangelise to young researchers, and to hope for change to follow. Inevitably this process is slow, perhaps so slow as to be ineffective.
Image by cameronneylon via Flickr If you’ve been around either myself or Deepak Singh you will almost certainly have heard the Jeff Jonas/Jon Udell soundbite: ‘Data finds data. Then people find people’. Jonas is referring to data management frameworks and knowledge discovery and Udell is referring to the power of integrated data to bring people together.
Image by cameronneylon via Flickr I wrote a few weeks back about the idea of re-imagining the formally published scientific paper as an aggregation of objects.
There has been an awful lot recently written and said about author-pays business models for scholarly publishing and a lot of it has focussed on PLoS ONE. Most recently Kent Anderson has written a piece on Scholarly Kitchen that contains a number of fairly serious misconceptions about the processes of PLoS ONE.
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr Friday and Saturday last week I had the privilege of attending the first Sage Congress. Hopefully this will be the first in a series of posts that cover that meeting because there is simply so much to think about and so much to just get on and do. This is not a post about public engagement work by scientists. It is not about going to schools and giving talks.
Image via Wikipedia On April 26 I am attending a joint meeting of the NSF and EuroHORCS (European Heads of Research Councils) on “Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age”. I have been asked to submit a one page white paper in advance of the meeting and have been struggling a bit with this. This is stage one, a draft document relating to researcher identifiers.
Suddenly it seems everyone wants to re-imagine scientific communication. From the ACS symposium a few weeks back to a PLoS Forum, via interesting conversations with a range of publishers, funders and scientists, it seems a lot of people are thinking much more seriously about how to make scientific communication more effective, more appropriate to the 21st century and above all, to take more advantage of the power of the web.
For those not in the UK this will probably be a little parochial. Don Foster is my local MP in Bath. The Digital Economy Bill, currently going through a “wash-up” process triggered by the announcement of a general election yesterday in the British Parliament has drawn extensive criticism from most of the British technology community. Last night an unprecedented number of people followed its second reading on BBC and via Twitter.
Image by cameronneylon via Flickr A number of things recently have lead me to reflect on the nature of interactions between social media, research organisations and the wider community. There has been an awful lot written about the effective use of social media by organisations, the risks involved in trusting staff and members of an organisation to engage productively and positively with a wider audience.
Image by cameronneylon via Flickr This post, while only 48 hours old is somewhat outdated by these two Friendfeed discussions. This was written independently of those discussions so it seemed worth putting out in its original form rather than spending too much time rewriting. I wrote recently about Sciencefeed, a Friendfeed like system aimed at scientists and was fairly critical.
I had the great pleasure and privilege of announcing the launch of the Panton Principles at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest on Saturday. The launch of the Panton Principles, many months after they were first suggested is really largely down to the work of Jonathan Gray.