open science

Open Collaborative Research Proposals

Jean-Claude Bradley — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:26:28 -0700

Description

As an indicator of the trends of Open Science and crowdsourcing, initiatives are arising to facilitate collaboration for the purpose of seeking research funding. For example, the SCIEnCE project (1) serves as a repository for such open proposals:

SCIEnCE – Share Collaborative Ideas, Enact Cooperative Efforts – is part of the growing movement dedicated to encouraging public sharing of testable ideas. Not just ideas, but plans of action – ideas will be developed into specific, step-by-step proposals via Wiki-inspired community editing. A new system for attributing credit will be used to distribute funding for SCIEnCE projects. The projects outlined by these collaboratively written proposals will be tackled with a cooperative experimental approach.

In order to fully capitalize on the benefits of such a strategy, the involvement of funding agencies will be necessary. This may only happen when a critical mass of proposals and people is reached.

Discussions about how new funding mechanisms could be established to take advantage of such a system are currently taking place (2). Cameron Neylon writes:

What is being generated here is new science, and science isn’t paid for per se. The resources that generate science are supported by governments, charities, and industry but the actual production of science is not supported. The truly radical approach to this would be to turn the system on its head. Don’t fund the universities to do science, fund the journals to buy science; then the system would reward increased efficiency. As it exists at the moment the funding system does nothing to support increased efficiency.

In stock exchanges and money markets, people are paid an awfully large amount of money to make what are fundamentally rather simple connections between buyers and sellers. This is still, for the most part, ultimately handled by humans, although there is a move towards fully automatic position taking. The connections we are talking about are much more complex to understand. To make this work we need to figure out how to reward the people who can make those connections. We also need to find a way to put money into the system to actually help provide the additional resources required to actually make things happen.

Future of chemistry

Source

1) http://sharescienceideas.wikispaces.com/
2) http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/04/16/the-science-exchange/

XML and Open Scientific Publishing

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:19:49 -0700

Description

Philip E. Bourne1, J. Lynn Fink, and Mark Gerstein make the argument for the wider use of XML in open publishing systems (over PDF or HMTL), and the need to create virtuous circles between XML adoption and the creation of tools-- e.g., visualizations to create high-level views of literatures, mashups that blur "the distinction between databases and journals," and editing tools to add semantic information to content early on. As they put it, open publishing has mainly been about cost containment to date, and not about exploiting the opportunities that open semantic frameworks offer:

For most of you, open access may imply free access to read the journals, but nothing more. There is a far greater potential, but, up to now, little to point to that highlights its tangible benefits. We would argue that, as yet, the full promise of open access has not been realized.

Plausible Accuracy comments,

the authors echo the call of Science Commons to work on creating applications which can leverage open scientific content. They describe some of the benefits and current shortcomings of producing manuscripts with XML markup (which provides for more facile machine reading and data extraction). They then go on to argue that the only way to convince people to go through the trouble of creating the machine-readable file is to demonstrate what can be done with the current level of markup and then drawing a picture of what expanding this would do.

Source

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000037
http://www.plausibleaccuracy.com/2008/03/31/leveraging-scientific-data-using-the-power-of-the-semantic-web-who-wants-to-start/

Physicists criticize APS over Wikipedia

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:19:45 -0700

Description

New Scientist reports on a dust-up within the American Physical Society over APS's refusal to allow scientists to reproduce articles published in Physical Review Letters on Wikipedia:

Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.

The physicists were upset after the American Physical Society withdrew its offer to publish two studies in Physical Review Letters because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia. The APS asks scientists to transfer their copyright to the society before they can publish in an APS journal. This prevents scientists contributing illustrations or other "derivative works" of their papers to many websites without explicit permission.

One interesting aspect of this is that the argument isn't over the freedom to summarize the articles, but to republish the articles. The ability to circulate reprints or preprints, to abstract results in other publications, etc., isn't restricted by publishers (any rational ones, anyway).

Source

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726473.300&print=true
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2820/physicists-press-scholarly-society-to-accept-open-access-publishing