The following is the text from which I spoke today at the .Astronomy conference. I think there is some video available on the .Astronomy UStream account and I also have audio which I will put up somewhere soon. There’s a funny thing about the science and coding communities. Each seems to think that the other has all the answers.
What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of doing scientific research.
One of the things we want the Open Research Computation journal to do is bring more of the transparency and open critique that characterises the best Open Source Software development processes into the scholarly peer review process. But you can talk about changing the way peer review works and you can actively do something about. Michael Barton and Hazel Barton have taken matters into their own hands and thrown the doors completely open.
So my previous post on peer review hit a nerve. Actually all of my posts on peer review hit a nerve and create massive traffic spikes and I’m still really unsure why. The strength of feeling around peer review seems out of all proportion to both its importance and indeed the extent to which people understand how it works in practice across different disciplines.
I’ve been interested for some time in capturing information and the context in which that information is created in the lab. The question of how to build an efficient and useable laboratory recording system is fundamentally one of how much information is necessary to record and how much of that can be recorded while bothering the researcher themselves as little as possible.
Image via Wikipedia I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about peer review, pre and post publication, and the attachment of the research community to traditional approaches. A news article in Nature though, in which I am quoted seems to have really struck a nerve for many people and has prompted me to actually write something.
I was honoured to talk at the symposium to celebrate Peter Murray-Rusts’ work. I didn’t want to give the usual kind of talk to this audience. I wanted to focus on what I think are the big risks and opportunities for the research community and why I believe that a focus on maximising research impact might be a way to bring the community together in a positive way.
Image via Wikipedia Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG?
Image by AnÃbal Pées Labory via Flickr Long term readers of this blog will know that I occasionally write an incomprehensible post that no-one understands about the nature of time on the web. This is my latest attempt to sort my thinking out on the issue. I don’t hold out that much hope but it seemed appropriate for the New Year… 2010 was the year that real time came to the mainstream web.
Image via Wikipedia Last Friday I spoke at the STM Innovation Seminar in London, taking in general terms the theme I’ve been developing recently of focussing on enabling user discovery rather than providing central filtering, of enabling people to act as their own gatekeeper rather than publishers taking that role on for themselves.