{"id":294,"date":"2010-09-10T17:53:39","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T17:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2010\/09\/10\/my_science_online_london_2010_impressions\/"},"modified":"2011-03-01T20:50:29","modified_gmt":"2011-03-01T20:50:29","slug":"my_science_online_london_2010_impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2010\/09\/10\/my_science_online_london_2010_impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"My Science Online London 2010 impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"

I attended the Science Online London 2010 conference (SOLo10) last week. There is a round-up
\nof post-conference reports <\/a>elsewhere on Nature Network.  This word cloud by Simon Cockell gives an idea of the key themes.  My personal highlights are below, though this only a
\npartial picture based mainly on the sessions I chose to attend.
\n<\/a>
\nCredit: SJ Cockell<\/em>
\nOpen Access<\/strong>.  Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal
\nSociety gave the introductory keynote talk. He stated that Learned Societies are
\nmoving towards Open Access and he just regretted that it couldn’t be done
\nimmediately. He noted that big deals with commercial publishers had delivered
\nbetter access, but it was still very incomplete access. He used the term
\n“rip-off” in association with commercial publishers, and stated “We don’t want
\nmore new journals!”, which was music to my ears.  He also noted that scholarly
\nmonograph publishing (low print runs; high prices) was a broken model that
\ndidn’t achieve its purpose of information dissemination. This theme was echoed
\nin my ebooks session the following day (write-up and link to follow).
\nScientific Journalism \/ Science Blogging.<\/strong> An interesting
\npanel discussion suggested that science writing was not in crisis, though some
\nindividual journalists may be. Ed Yong suggested that the web is an ideal
\nplayground for science writers, but they have to take advantage of it, not just
\nwrite the same way they always have for print. Alice Bell suggested journalism
\nshould move upstream, and write about how scientists work rather than just about
\nthe results. This may not square with the need to satisfy newsdesks by making
\nscience stories into news, but perhaps (my thought) the equation of science and news is not
\na helpful one for science in any case. Another discussion panel on science
\nblogging didn’t really catch fire.  I had hoped for a high level view of the
\nstate and future directions of science blogging a la Zivkovic. In another session, Evan Harris
\ngave some tips about using online tools to organise campaigns.  These seem to be proving useful<\/a> already. Formats and media.<\/strong> I felt that the spirit of Marshall McLuhan was
\nhovering around the discussion over the two days. With 250 attendees
\nwho habitually inhabit an online space there were a large number of twitterers
\npresent at the conference, and others following it from a distance, so Twitter was buzzing. More than 6000
\ntweets with the hashtag #solo10 were issued. In some conference sessions a twitterwall was
\ndisplayed, but it was found by some to be a distraction, (sometimes a welcome
\ndistraction it has to be said).  Martyn Robbins commented en passant<\/em>
\nthat PDF was an insult to science – “it’s like inventing the phone and using it
\nto transmit Morse Code”, and this metaphor was much-repeated and extended. Overly
\ntext-heavy Powerpoint presentations also came in for much criticism<\/a>. In
\nthe spirit of reductio ad absurdum,<\/em> I heard of one Twitter message that was an 8-page PDF containing a single Tweet!  The reply was contained in a
\nPowerpoint file. They’re a funny lot, these online types.
\nResearch Data.  <\/strong>BiomedCentral described their work in
\npromoting good practice in publishing data. They publish journals about
\ndatamining, e.g. BioDataMining<\/em><\/a> <\/em>and
\nrecently published a statement
\non open data<\/a>, supporting the Panton Principles. The British Library like to
\nthink of themselves as the steward for dataset preservation (hmm…), and are
\ninvolved in projects like DataCite<\/a>, to
\nmake datasets citeable, and Dryad<\/a>, to
\ntie data with published articles more effectively.  They are also starting to
\nsupport dataset
\nresource discovery<\/a> through the British Library catalogue. Simon Hodson from
\nJISC gave a canter through some of the enormous number of projects that JISC’s
\nManaging Research
\nData<\/a> programme is funding.
\nRecommendation tools<\/strong>. CiteuLike and Mendeley showed some of
\nthe work they are doing to develop better algorithms for recommending things
\n(and people) you might be interested in.  Personal collections and
\nrecommendations are usually a good source of ‘something interesting’, said Kevin
\nEmamy, giving the example of Neil Gaiman’s
\nbookshelves<\/a>. Jason Hoyt warned that even though search engines and
\nrecommendation tools give the appearance of being machines, they are algorithms
\nobeying rules created by people and are not therefore value-neutral. The recent
\nannouncement of Google
\nInstant<\/a> brings this point home. Jason suggested that we should more often
\nquestion the neutrality and editorial intent of Google, PubMed etc.  Librarians
\nwill always tell you not to trust a single source, but to also use Scopus, Web
\nof Science or other tools, but no-one listens to us!
\nORCID<\/strong>. Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier is an
\ninitiative that started nearly a year ago and has just formally become a legal
\nentity<\/a>. Geoff Bilder of CrossRef explained the principles governing the
\ndesign of ORCID:<\/p>\n