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.

Yes, I’m afraid it’s yet another over the top response to yesterday’s big announcement of Google Wave, the latest paradigm shifting gob-smackingly brilliant piece of technology (or PR depending on your viewpoint) out of Google. My interest, however is pretty specific, how can we leverage it to help us capture, communicate, and publish research?

There has been some debate going backwards and forwards over the past few weeks about licensing, peoples expectations, and the extent to which researchers can be expected to understand, or want to understand, the details of legal terms, licensing and other technical minutiae. It is reasonable for scientific researchers not to wish to get into the details.

I spent two days this week visiting Peter Murray-Rust and others at the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge. There was a lot of useful discussion and I learned an awful lot that requires more thinking and will no doubt result in further posts. In this one I want to relay a conversation we had over lunch with Peter, Jim Downing, Nico Adams, Nick Day and Rufus Pollock that seemed extremely productive.

There has been a lot written and said recently about the “real time” web most recently in an interview of Paul Buchheit on ReadWriteWeb. The premise is that if items and conversations are carried on in “real time” then they are more efficient and more engaging. The counter argument has been that they become more trivial.

On Friday (yes, that’s this Friday) a series of Unconferences that has been pulled together in response to the Digital Britain Report and Forum will kick of with one being held at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Didcot. The object of the meeting is to contribute to a coherent and succinct response to the current interim report and to try and get across to Government what a truly Digital Britain would look like.

So there’s been a lot of antagonistic and cynical commentary about Web2.0 tools particularly focused on Twitter, but also encompassing Friendfeed and the whole range of tools that are of interest to me. Some of this is ill informed and some of it more thoughtful but the overall tenor of the comments is that “this is all about chattering up the back, not paying attention, and making a disruption” or at the very least that it is all trivial

On Monday I am speaking as part of a meeting on Use Cases for Provenance (Programme), which has a lot of interesting talks scheduled. I appear to be last. I am not sure whether that means I am the comedy closer or the pre-dinner entertainment.

This post is a follow on from a random tweet that I sent a few weeks back in response to a query on twitter from Lord Drayson, the UK’s Minister of State for Science and Innovation.

There has been a lot of recent discussion about the relative importance of Open Source and Open Data (Friendfeed, Egon Willighagen, Ian Davis). I don’t fancy recapitulating the whole argument but following a discussion on Twitter with Glyn Moody this morning [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] I think there is a way of looking at this with a slightly different perspective. But first a short digression.

I am speaking at the Eduserv Symposium on London in late May on the subject of the importance of identity systems for advancing the open research agenda. From the announcement: The Eduserv Symposium 2009 will be held on Thursday 21st May 2009 at the Royal College of Physicians, London.