Administrators define the field
November 15, 2008
Administrators define the field
A panel of deans and directors from Kansas City educational institutions met at the School of Education Monday evening, affording students interested in college administration careers a chance to discuss the field’s challenges and opportunities.
The conversation was sponsored by UMKC’s Career Services Center and featured four panelists with extensive credentials in higher education administration including: UMKC’s Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Mary Lou Hines-Fritts, William Jewell College’s Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Residence Life, Ernie Stufflebean, Rockhurst University’s Assistant Dean of Students, Sean Grube, and Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley’s Dean of Administrative Services, Thomas Walker.
LiveScience: Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End
Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End / By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor / posted: 02 September 2008 11:30 am ET
Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.
The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists — allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.
[snip]
Open Science
The open science approach forces researchers to grapple with the question of whether they can still get sufficient credit for their ideas, said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, co-organizer of a conference on the topic set to begin Sept. 8 at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada.
[BTW: I Will Be Attending This Unique Conference Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology [http://tinyurl.com/6ll8fb] / Look For Conference-Related Postings on the _Scholarship 2.0_ Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/] within the next two weeks]
[snip]
Open science is a shorthand for technological tools, many of which are Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At its most radical, the ethos could be described as “no insider information.” Information available to researchers, as far as possible, is made available to absolutely everyone.
Beyond email, teleconferencing and search engines, there are many examples: blogs where scientists can correspond casually about their work long before it is published in a journal; social networks that are scientist friendly such as Laboratree and Ologeez; GoogleDocs and wikis which make it easy for people to collaborate via the Web on single documents; a site called Connotea that allows scientists to share bookmarks for research papers; sites like Arxiv, where physicists post their “pre-print” research papers before they are published in a print journal; OpenWetWare which allows scientists to post and share new innovations in lab techniques; the Journal of Visualized Experiments, an open-access site where you can see videos of how research teams do their work; GenBank, an online searchable database for DNA sequences; Science Commons, a non-profit project at MIT to make research more efficient via the Web, such as enabling easy online ordering of lab materials referenced in journal articles; virtual conferences; online open-access (and free) journals like Public Library of Science (PLoS); and open-source software that can often be downloaded free off Web sites.
[BTW: Several Of These Innovations Have Been Profiled In My SciTechNet(sm) Blog [http://scitechnet.blogspot.com/] and/or The Scholarship 2.0 Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/]
The upshot: Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not everyone agrees.
Networked Cyborgs
Just a few decades ago, as a scientist, here is how you did your work: You toiled in obscurity and relative solitude.
[snip]
However, today, more and more scientists, as well as researchers in the humanities, operate like transparent, networked cyborgs. Background research is mostly done online, not in the library. Some data and preliminary research might be posted online via a blog or open notebook. Early write-ups of the work might be announced to the public, or at least discussed online with peers. And these early write-ups might also be posted to an online publication that is not peer-reviewed in the strict sense.
[snip]
“In areas like my own subfields of theoretical physics,” said MIT physicist David Kaiser, “the only constraint [on how rapidly one generates research papers] is, ‘Did you have more coffee that day?’ We aren’t usually held up trying to get an instrument to work, or slogging through complicated data analysis.”Most people think faster is better, but there are other issues.
Is It A Good Thing?
There is “no question” that all efforts to make science more open are positive for the progress of science, says open science proponent and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who posts his lab notebook online and started a blog in 2005 called UsefulChemistry where he and his colleagues regularly discuss chemistry problems as well as Web 2.0 tools and the technical and philosophical issues they raise.His online notebook and blog definitely make it easier to communicate with colleagues, he said. Such sharing also makes it easier for others to “replicate” scientists’ work — try it themselves and convince themselves that you are right. And this replication issue is one of the principles behind scientific research. Anyone who has written down a recipe for a friend knows that we all tend to spell things out more clearly when sharing them than we would if we were just taking notes for ourselves in our own shorthand.
Open science also has the potential to prevent discrimination in access to information. Arxiv, the site for posting pre-print physics papers, was started in 1991 by Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to help provide equal access to prepublication information to graduate students, postdocs and researchers in developing countries.
[BTW: Paul Ginsparg will be one of several Major Players attending/presenting at The Conference [http://science21stcentury.org/abstracts.html]]
[snip]
And open science benefits the public, Bradley said. He tries to keep his posts fairly accessible (although this is not the case for all open notebooks and open science blogs).
[snip]
“It’s not clear to me that professional scientists or people in academic institutions have a monopoly on good ideas,” he said. “There are very smart people outside of academia, for example hobbyists or people in industry who could contribute, and having more contributors can only help. The same applies to interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.”
[snip]
Drawbacks of Open Science
One of the biggest fears of nearly all researchers is that someone else hears what you’re doing and beats you to publication. That means you wasted a lot of time (and most researchers work extremely long hours, so loss of productivity is especially painful and can also harm one’s chances for getting a job or promotion or funding for the next research project). Once you publicly reveal your thoughts, data or experimental results, some say, you lose control over ownership of that information. This topic is covered by an area of law called intellectual property, as well as patent law, and there can be significant money to be fought over when it comes to patents.
Hossenfelder, the conference organizer, says she knows of several examples in which scientists have had an idea for something, talked about it openly and then somebody else has published the fleshed-out idea first without giving any credit beyond an acknowledgment to the original idea-holder. Acknowledgments don’t advance careers.
However there are solutions to this, she said. For instance, the prominent scientific journal Nature encourages authors to include brief summaries of which author contributed what to a project. Some say that online posts provide a time-stamped record of when an experiment was documented. Those stamps can easily be arbitrarily altered after the fact, but it might also be possible to “lock” posts at a certain date after which they could not be changed without some sign-off permission to break the lock, Hossenfelder said. [snip]
Fear of Losing Peer Review
Another drawback of open science can be that results go public before they should. In science, experimental results are frequently proven wrong by subsequent work. Yet even peer review cannot ensure against this, nor can it prevent outright fraud, as proven by a 2005 case involving a South Korean scientist who claimed to have achieved the first cloning of a human embryo. A later examination of his work showed he had fabricated his results.
[snip]
“The social system of science has become so complicated, unregulated and dispersed in terms of geography and disciplines, so peer review has been elevated to a principle that unifies a fragmented field,” Biagioli said.
[snip]
And today, Arxiv, one of the most frequently cited examples of open science, has no peer review for individual papers, but it has begun to add in some constraints on allowable authors. The site used to allow anyone with email addresses associated with academic institutions to post their papers. Now, authors of research papers who post in Arxiv are vetted before they can post for the first time. In some ways, things are tightening up when it comes to openness in physics, Kaiser said. In any case, the function of print journals, in physics at least, is changing.
“Ease of sharing everything prior to peer review is flourishing, and in my opinion very few physicists are reading journals for information these days,” Kaiser said. “Journals have largely lost their information function.”
[snip]
For The Good Of Truth, Humanity, Economies?
Another argument in favor of open science is sort of a big picture issue for humanity, scientific truth and economies, Neylon said.
“Making things more open leads to more innovation and more economic activity, and so the technology that underlies the Web makes it possible to share in a way that was never really possible before, while at same time it also means that kinds of models and results generated are much more rich,” he said.
This is the open source approach to software development, as opposed to commercial closed source approaches, Neylon said. The internals are protected by developers and lawyers, but the platform is available for the public to build on in very creative ways.
“Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to your [work] in a different way,” Neylon said. “The question is ‘Can we make that as effective as samples data and analysis as it does for a map and set of addresses for a coffee shop?’ That is the vision.”
[http://www.livescience.com/culture/080902-open-science.html]
Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder For The HeadsUp !
[http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science21]
Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance
November 12, 2008
Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance
Ethics In Science And Enviromental Politics / THEME SECTION / The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance
Editors: Howard I. Browman, Konstantinos I. Stergiou
Quantifying the relative performance of individual scholars, groups of scholars, departments, institutions, provinces/states/regions and countries has become an integral part of decision-making over research policy, funding allocations, awarding of grants, faculty hirings, and claims for promotion and tenure. Bibliometric indices (based mainly upon citation counts), such as the h-index and the journal impact factor, are heavily relied upon in such assessments. There is a growing consensus, and a deep concern, that these indices — more-and-more often used as a replacement for the informed judgement of peers — are misunderstood and are, therefore, often misinterpreted and misused. The articles in this ESEP Theme Section present a range of perspectives on these issues. Alternative approaches, tools and metrics that will hopefully lead to a more balanced role for these instruments are presented.
TITLE PAGE [Preface] ; Full text in pdf format
Browman HI, Stergiou KI / INTRODUCTION: Factors and indices are one thing, deciding who is scholarly, why they are scholarly, and the relative value of their scholarship is something else entirely ESEP 8:1-3 ; Full text in pdf format
Campbell P / Escape from the impact factor ESEP 8:5-7 ; Full text in pdf format
Lawrence PA / Lost in publication: how measurement harms science ESEP 8:9-11 ; Full text in pdf format
Todd PA, Ladle RJ / Hidden dangers of a ‘citation culture’ ESEP 8:13-16 ; Full text in pdf format
Taylor M, Perakakis P, Trachana V / The siege of science ESEP 8:17-40 ; Full text in pdf format
Cheung WWL/ The economics of post-doc publishing ESEP 8:41-44 ; Full text in pdf format
Tsikliras AC/ Chasing after the high impact ESEP 8:45-47 ; Full text in pdf format
Zitt M, Bassecoulard E/ Challenges for scientometric indicators: data demining, knowledge flows measurements and diversity issues ESEP 8:49-60 ; Full text in pdf format
Harzing AWK, van der Wal R / Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis ESEP 8:61-73 ; Full text in pdf format
Pauly D, Stergiou KI / Re-interpretation of ‘influence weight’ as a citation-based Index of New Knowledge (INK) ESEP 8:75-78 ; Full text in pdf format
Giske J / Benefitting from bibliometry ESEP 8:79-81 ; Full text in pdf format
Butler L/ Using a balanced approach to bibliometrics: quantitative performance measures in the Australian Research Quality Framework ESEP 8:83-92 ; Full text in pdf format Erratum
Bornmann L, Mutz R, Neuhaus C, Daniel HD / Citation counts for research evaluation: standards of good practice for analyzing bibliometric data and presenting and interpreting results ESEP 8:93-102 ; Full text in pdf format
Harnad S / Validating research performance metrics against peer rankings ESEP 8:103-107 ; Full text in pdf format
Table of Contents
[http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/esep/v8/n1/]
Alpha Software ahora en Espanol!
November 7, 2008
Alpha Software ahora en Espanol!
We’re slicing the limes and passing the tequila here at Alpha Software today in honor of our newest Mexican partner, Serco Commercial. Just kidding, I’m just sitting alone in my office wearing a Sombrero eating a taco. Kidding again, I’m just alone in my office. But I am really excited!
Headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, with branches throughout the country, Serco has been in the software biz for more than 15 years. They specialize in designing, programming, and implementing desktop and Web-based software solutions tailored to their customers’ needs.
We recently sat down with Luis Rodriguez, software engineer and president of Serco Commercial, to talk about our promising new partnership. Please welcome Luis and his team to the Alpha community, and enjoy this introduction we put together.
Y ahora, una version en espanol. You like that? I’ve been practicing.
All’s calm on the IT front
I recently shared what I thought the financial crisis means for IT. And on a day like today, as the stock market crumbles before our eyes, it’s good to keep that in mind.
Need a little more reassurance? Late last week, Digg Inc., the popular social networking site whose users vote on their favorite news stories, announced a major expansion fueled by a $28.7 million in Series C funding.
Our retirement savings might temporarily be swirling down the toilet, but innovation isn’t a commodity that’s bought and sold. Great ideas will still find great funding. And great developers and apps will still find customers in need.
And the financial markets? They’ll bounce back.
Trick or treat yourself to the ultimate Alpha Five V9 training tool
November 2, 2008
Trick or treat yourself to the ultimate Alpha Five V9 training tool
Happy Halloween, everyone! For everyone hoping to be an Alphaholic for Halloween, today’s your lucky day.
On Monday, we sent out a newsletter with a special offer for our Alpha Five Total Training DVD-ROM. In less than two days, we sold over 500 copies.
There’s over 65 lessons in the five-hours of video, where we show you how to build secure desktop and Web database applications with reporting and AJAX. Basically, we cover it all. By the time you’re finished, it’ll be scary how much you know about Alpha Five. Pick yours up today, because they’re selling like hotcakes!
All’s calm on the IT front
I recently shared what I thought the financial crisis means for IT. And on a day like today, as the stock market crumbles before our eyes, it’s good to keep that in mind.
Need a little more reassurance? Late last week, Digg Inc., the popular social networking site whose users vote on their favorite news stories, announced a major expansion fueled by a $28.7 million in Series C funding.
Our retirement savings might temporarily be swirling down the toilet, but innovation isn’t a commodity that’s bought and sold. Great ideas will still find great funding. And great developers and apps will still find customers in need.
And the financial markets? They’ll bounce back.
All’s calm on the IT front
October 30, 2008
All’s calm on the IT front
I recently shared what I thought the financial crisis means for IT. And on a day like today, as the stock market crumbles before our eyes, it’s good to keep that in mind.
Need a little more reassurance? Late last week, Digg Inc., the popular social networking site whose users vote on their favorite news stories, announced a major expansion fueled by a $28.7 million in Series C funding.
Our retirement savings might temporarily be swirling down the toilet, but innovation isn’t a commodity that’s bought and sold. Great ideas will still find great funding. And great developers and apps will still find customers in need.
And the financial markets? They’ll bounce back.
Portable WinRAR 3.80 Beta 3
WinRAR 3.80 Beta 3 Portable | 2.29 MB WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. Features of WinRAR: - Using WinRAR puts you ahead of the crowd when it comes to compression by consistently making smaller archives than the
Current Biomedical Publication System: A Distorted View of the Reality of Scientific Data?
October 29, 2008
Current Biomedical Publication System: A Distorted View of the Reality of Scientific Data?
Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science
Young NS, Ioannidis JPA, Al-Ubaydli O
PLoS Medicine Vol. 5, No. 10, e201 / October 7 2008
[doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201]
Summary
The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner’s curse,” a more general statement of publication bias, suggests that the small proportion of results chosen for publication are unrepresentative of scientists’ repeated samplings of the real world.
The self-correcting mechanism in science is retarded by the extreme imbalance between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact). This system would be expected intrinsically to lead to the misallocation of resources. The scarcity of available outlets is artificial, based on the costs of printing in an electronic age and a belief that selectivity is equivalent to quality.
Science is subject to great uncertainty: we cannot be confident now which efforts will ultimately yield worthwhile achievements. However, the current system abdicates to a small number of intermediates an authoritative prescience to anticipate a highly unpredictable future. In considering society’s expectations and our own goals as scientists, we believe that there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated.
Full Text Available At:
[http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201]
Box 1. Potential Competing or Complementary Options and Solutions for Scientific Publication
- Accept the current system as having evolved to be the optimal solution to complex and competing problems.
- Promote rapid, digital publication of all articles that contain no flaws, irrespective of perceived “importance”.
- Adopt preferred publication of negative over positive results; require very demanding reproducibility criteria before publishing positive results.
- Select articles for publication in highly visible venues based on the quality of study methods, their rigorous implementation, and astute interpretation, irrespective of results.
- Adopt formal post-publication downward adjustment of claims of papers published in prestigious journals.
- Modify current practice to elevate and incorporate more expansive data to accompany print articles or to be accessible in attractive formats associated with high-quality journals: combine the “magazine” and “archive” roles of journals.
- Promote critical reviews, digests, and summaries of the large amounts of biomedical data now generated.
- Offer disincentives to herding and incentives for truly independent, novel, or heuristic scientific work.
- Recognise explicitly and respond to the branding role of journal publication in career development and funding decisions.
- Modulate publication practices based on empirical research, which might address correlates of long-term successful outcomes (such as reproducibility, applicability, opening new avenues) of published papers.
>>>Extended Version< <<
The Market for Exchange of Scientific Information: The Winner’s Curse, Artificial Scarcity, and Uncertainty in Biomedical Publication
[http://medicine.plosjournals.org/archive/1549-1676/5/10/supinfo/10.1371_journal.pmed.0050201.sd001.pdf]
Guest Blog
More Evidence on Why We Need Radical Reform of Science Publishing / Richard Smith
PLoS Medicine invited Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and current board member of PLoS, to discuss an essay published this week by Neal Young, John Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli that argues that the current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data.
“For me this paper simply adds to the growing evidence and argument that we need radical reform of how we publish science. I foresee rapid publication of studies that include full datasets and the software used to manipulate them without prepublication peer review onto a large open access database that can be searched and mined. Instead of a few studies receiving disproportionate attention we will depend more on the systematic reviews that will be updated rapidly (and perhaps automatically) as new results appear.”
[http://www.plos.org/cms/node/409]
News Coverage
The Economist [10-09-08] : Scientific Journals: Publish and Be Wrong
“Dr Ioannidis made a splash three years ago by arguing, quite convincingly, that most published scientific research is wrong. Now, along with Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland and Omar Al-Ubaydli, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, he suggests why.”
[http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376658]
Newsweek [10-06-08] : Don’t Believe What You Read, Redux / Sharon Begley
“Bottom line: when it comes to ‘the latest studies,’ take what you read with a grain of salt.
Related
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False / John P. A. Ioannidis / PLoS Med. 2005 August; 2(8): e124 / August 30 2005
[doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124]
Summary
There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance.
Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.
[http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124]
SPARC Webcast: The Right to Research: Engaging Students on the Topic of Access to Research
October 28, 2008
SPARC Webcast: The Right to Research: Engaging Students on the Topic of Access to Research
“Today’s students have come of age in the Internet era. Access to knowledge is the norm for them, rather than the exception. Students recognize how the lack of access is detrimental to research and education, and how the subscription-only model can conflict with the ethic of the academy, which is to share knowledge with everyone. I hope this guide will engage students and help them become more active participants in the campus conversation.”
(Gavin Baker, author of The Right to Research) / [http://www.arl.org/sparc/students/]
The Right to Research: Engaging Students on the Topic of Access to Research
August 6, 2008 / Wednesday / 1:00PM – 2:30PM (Eastern)
With: Gavin Baker, Graduate, University of Florida and SPARC Outreach Fellow ; Nelson Pavlosky, Law Student, George Mason University, and SPARC Summer Intern ; Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC.
Moderator: Jennifer McLennan, Director of Communications, SPARC
Today’s college students – both undergraduate and graduate –possess tremendous potential for shaping the future of scholarly exchange. Appreciating student perspectives on information sharing and access to research can help to advance library outreach programs. In partnership with student leaders, SPARC has developed The Right to Research – a campaign that encourages student engagement and provides a suite of materials to help libraries connect with students on the topic of access to research. The goal of The Right to Research is to explore ways that libraries and students might advance new opportunities to work together in creating a more open system of scholarly communication.
Please join us for the latest installment in The Right to Research campaign. At this online event, student leaders Gavin Baker and Nelson Pavlosky will lead a discussion on: why working with students is critical to advancing the discussing of access to research; how to effectively engage students on campus and what resources are available; and specific actions to take next semester – including an announcement of our next nationwide on-campus event to raise awareness.
This invitation is open to SPARC members and other libraries only. You’ll need access to a phone and a Web browser to participate. Access details will be sent to registrants. Limited to 100 participants. Register by end of day, Friday, August 1, 2008 at [http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/event_registration.shtml]
Questions and comments may be directed to Jennifer McLennan (jennifer@arl.org).
Source [http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/08-0722.shtml]
Webcast Slides [http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/student_engagement_v3_08-aug.pdf]
Political Corner - Light rail debate
Among other issues, Kansas City residents will vote this November on whether to build a light rail transportation system for the city.
The proposition reads, “shall the City of Kansas City impose a sales tax of one-fourth percent for the purpose of funding capital improvements, and a sales tax of one eighth percent, both for a period not to exceed 25 years, beginning April 1, 2009 .
LiveScience: Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End
October 23, 2008
LiveScience: Era of Scientific Secrecy Near EndEra of Scientific Secrecy Near End / By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor / posted: 02 September 2008 11:30 am ET
Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.
The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists — allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.
[snip]
Open Science
The open science approach forces researchers to grapple with the question of whether they can still get sufficient credit for their ideas, said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, co-organizer of a conference on the topic set to begin Sept. 8 at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada.
[BTW: I Will Be Attending This Unique Conference Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology [http://tinyurl.com/6ll8fb] / Look For Conference-Related Postings on the _Scholarship 2.0_ Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/] within the next two weeks]
[snip]
Open science is a shorthand for technological tools, many of which are Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At its most radical, the ethos could be described as “no insider information.” Information available to researchers, as far as possible, is made available to absolutely everyone.
Beyond email, teleconferencing and search engines, there are many examples: blogs where scientists can correspond casually about their work long before it is published in a journal; social networks that are scientist friendly such as Laboratree and Ologeez; GoogleDocs and wikis which make it easy for people to collaborate via the Web on single documents; a site called Connotea that allows scientists to share bookmarks for research papers; sites like Arxiv, where physicists post their “pre-print” research papers before they are published in a print journal; OpenWetWare which allows scientists to post and share new innovations in lab techniques; the Journal of Visualized Experiments, an open-access site where you can see videos of how research teams do their work; GenBank, an online searchable database for DNA sequences; Science Commons, a non-profit project at MIT to make research more efficient via the Web, such as enabling easy online ordering of lab materials referenced in journal articles; virtual conferences; online open-access (and free) journals like Public Library of Science (PLoS); and open-source software that can often be downloaded free off Web sites.
[BTW: Several Of These Innovations Have Been Profiled In My SciTechNet(sm) Blog [http://scitechnet.blogspot.com/] and/or The Scholarship 2.0 Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/]
The upshot: Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not everyone agrees.
Networked Cyborgs
Just a few decades ago, as a scientist, here is how you did your work: You toiled in obscurity and relative solitude.
[snip]
However, today, more and more scientists, as well as researchers in the humanities, operate like transparent, networked cyborgs. Background research is mostly done online, not in the library. Some data and preliminary research might be posted online via a blog or open notebook. Early write-ups of the work might be announced to the public, or at least discussed online with peers. And these early write-ups might also be posted to an online publication that is not peer-reviewed in the strict sense.
[snip]
“In areas like my own subfields of theoretical physics,” said MIT physicist David Kaiser, “the only constraint [on how rapidly one generates research papers] is, ‘Did you have more coffee that day?’ We aren’t usually held up trying to get an instrument to work, or slogging through complicated data analysis.”Most people think faster is better, but there are other issues.
Is It A Good Thing?
There is “no question” that all efforts to make science more open are positive for the progress of science, says open science proponent and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who posts his lab notebook online and started a blog in 2005 called UsefulChemistry where he and his colleagues regularly discuss chemistry problems as well as Web 2.0 tools and the technical and philosophical issues they raise.His online notebook and blog definitely make it easier to communicate with colleagues, he said. Such sharing also makes it easier for others to “replicate” scientists’ work — try it themselves and convince themselves that you are right. And this replication issue is one of the principles behind scientific research. Anyone who has written down a recipe for a friend knows that we all tend to spell things out more clearly when sharing them than we would if we were just taking notes for ourselves in our own shorthand.
Open science also has the potential to prevent discrimination in access to information. Arxiv, the site for posting pre-print physics papers, was started in 1991 by Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to help provide equal access to prepublication information to graduate students, postdocs and researchers in developing countries.
[BTW: Paul Ginsparg will be one of several Major Players attending/presenting at The Conference [http://science21stcentury.org/abstracts.html]]
[snip]
And open science benefits the public, Bradley said. He tries to keep his posts fairly accessible (although this is not the case for all open notebooks and open science blogs).
[snip]
“It’s not clear to me that professional scientists or people in academic institutions have a monopoly on good ideas,” he said. “There are very smart people outside of academia, for example hobbyists or people in industry who could contribute, and having more contributors can only help. The same applies to interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.”
[snip]
Drawbacks of Open Science
One of the biggest fears of nearly all researchers is that someone else hears what you’re doing and beats you to publication. That means you wasted a lot of time (and most researchers work extremely long hours, so loss of productivity is especially painful and can also harm one’s chances for getting a job or promotion or funding for the next research project). Once you publicly reveal your thoughts, data or experimental results, some say, you lose control over ownership of that information. This topic is covered by an area of law called intellectual property, as well as patent law, and there can be significant money to be fought over when it comes to patents.
Hossenfelder, the conference organizer, says she knows of several examples in which scientists have had an idea for something, talked about it openly and then somebody else has published the fleshed-out idea first without giving any credit beyond an acknowledgment to the original idea-holder. Acknowledgments don’t advance careers.
However there are solutions to this, she said. For instance, the prominent scientific journal Nature encourages authors to include brief summaries of which author contributed what to a project. Some say that online posts provide a time-stamped record of when an experiment was documented. Those stamps can easily be arbitrarily altered after the fact, but it might also be possible to “lock” posts at a certain date after which they could not be changed without some sign-off permission to break the lock, Hossenfelder said. [snip]
Fear of Losing Peer Review
Another drawback of open science can be that results go public before they should. In science, experimental results are frequently proven wrong by subsequent work. Yet even peer review cannot ensure against this, nor can it prevent outright fraud, as proven by a 2005 case involving a South Korean scientist who claimed to have achieved the first cloning of a human embryo. A later examination of his work showed he had fabricated his results.
[snip]
“The social system of science has become so complicated, unregulated and dispersed in terms of geography and disciplines, so peer review has been elevated to a principle that unifies a fragmented field,” Biagioli said.
[snip]
And today, Arxiv, one of the most frequently cited examples of open science, has no peer review for individual papers, but it has begun to add in some constraints on allowable authors. The site used to allow anyone with email addresses associated with academic institutions to post their papers. Now, authors of research papers who post in Arxiv are vetted before they can post for the first time. In some ways, things are tightening up when it comes to openness in physics, Kaiser said. In any case, the function of print journals, in physics at least, is changing.
“Ease of sharing everything prior to peer review is flourishing, and in my opinion very few physicists are reading journals for information these days,” Kaiser said. “Journals have largely lost their information function.”
[snip]
For The Good Of Truth, Humanity, Economies?
Another argument in favor of open science is sort of a big picture issue for humanity, scientific truth and economies, Neylon said.
“Making things more open leads to more innovation and more economic activity, and so the technology that underlies the Web makes it possible to share in a way that was never really possible before, while at same time it also means that kinds of models and results generated are much more rich,” he said.
This is the open source approach to software development, as opposed to commercial closed source approaches, Neylon said. The internals are protected by developers and lawyers, but the platform is available for the public to build on in very creative ways.
“Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to your [work] in a different way,” Neylon said. “The question is ‘Can we make that as effective as samples data and analysis as it does for a map and set of addresses for a coffee shop?’ That is the vision.”
[http://www.livescience.com/culture/080902-open-science.html]
Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder For The HeadsUp !
[http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science21]
DSEDuke’s new blog and Stuart Taylor
Duke Students for an Ethical Duke has a new blog. Be sure and check it out.
They also have a link to video of Stuart Taylor’s excellent speech at Duke on Friday. The video is low resolution and they are working on putting up one with a higher resolution. However, Stuart’s speech is good enough that you might not want to wait.
Duke Settles With Indicted Players
October 23, 2008
Duke Settles With Indicted Players
Breaking News: The Chronicle is reporting that Duke University reached a financial settlement with formerly indicted lacrosse players. Here are more details:
Science Dissemination Using Open Access: Table of Contents
Science Dissemination Using Open Access: A Compendium Of Selected Literature On Open Access / Editors E. Canessa and M. Zennaro (ICTP-SDU, Italy).
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) / July 2008 / 207 pp. / ISBN 92-95003-40-3.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I: Selected Literature - 1
OVERVIEW - 3
GETTINGS PROFESSIONAL - 37
Challenges for new journals ….. 38
Measuring your impact …… 39
Journal standards and identifiers …… 40
Building reliable and ongoing content …… 42
Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) ….. 42
LEGAL FRAMEWORK - 43
Open Access journals ….. 73
All’s calm on the IT front
October 5, 2008
All’s calm on the IT front
I recently shared what I thought the financial crisis means for IT. And on a day like today, as the stock market crumbles before our eyes, it’s good to keep that in mind.
Need a little more reassurance? Late last week, Digg Inc., the popular social networking site whose users vote on their favorite news stories, announced a major expansion fueled by a $28.7 million in Series C funding.
Our retirement savings might temporarily be swirling down the toilet, but innovation isn’t a commodity that’s bought and sold. Great ideas will still find great funding. And great developers and apps will still find customers in need.
And the financial markets? They’ll bounce back.
You can find me at eMetrics
I’ve got some pretty exciting news regarding speakers at this year’s eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington, D.C.. Have you heard who will be speaking there? Me!
Janet Park and I will be giving a presentation we’ve titled How to Discover the Faces Behind Your Clicks. Janet is the President of Marketing Frontiers and long-time Alpha developer. You might also remember her from her post here on the Alpha blog.
In our presentation, we’ll be explaining that your business’s success isn’t necessarily based on how many people are visiting your site, but rather who. And we’ll show you some pretty cool ways to find out exactly who is doing the clicking.
The eMetrics Summit takes place Oct. 20 - 23 at the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center in Alexandria, Va.