SpotOn day 2.

Yesterday was awesome, let’s see how today goes. I was watching from afar, as my wife attended, and now I’m here for the afternoon sessions.

sessions:

• Ben Goldacre
• publishing data, what’s in it for researchers?

now on to the sessions!

[Incentivising Open Access][ioa]. (top)

Nice panel, you can see the list of the panel on the site homepage, I’ll again, mostly focus on the trend of the discussion.

What do researchers get credit for? [David Shotton][ds]: getting grant applications coming in, and publications in high impact journals. He has been in hiring comittees where these are the only things that have mattered.

There are some dark aspects of getting credit, having a team beneath you, upon which you can place your name for their publications.

You don't get credit for working in teams. 

Personal referecens from people you have a good working relationhsip with. 

We should look for concrete pieces of evidence that open beahvior has a positive effect on the kinds of measures that are being used.

Not all of the things we are doing are measurable.

There is a bit of a discussion around tying things to ORCID, the suggestion is made to tie reviewing work from frontiers to ORCID ids. (I think we as a community can see the potential of making contributions visible, and weaving n all of these non-traditional aspects, however it will take a social shift, which is where funder mandates come in).

There is a bit of discussion around the stack overflow model.

There is a bit of discssion around sticks, in particular the RCUK model. Why are funding agencies so polite to scientists, when they are putting in the model. The Wellcome are withholding 10% of the grant if the grantee is not OA complient. Stephen .. says he would like to see public statement disavowing the use the impact factor.

If you want to have other contributions considered the way to do this is to cure our addiction to the impact factor

The RCUK person mentions that this has been made explicit with the RCUK policy. She also mentions that the issue with IF is that the addiciton is happening at the research level. She says that it would be good if there were a peer pressure around not publishing in open access.

Graham from Frontiers agrees that funders have a signifcant role, but it can work on a much smaller scale with communutities of editors. As an example, one community within frontiers decided that no papers would be even considered for review unless authors made their data open. Communities can enable openess on a small scale, and technology can help with this.

One of the final comments is about looking for cultural change

every perosn in this room needs to go out an walk the walk and talk the talk. Scientists are not donkeys, but they are hurd animals, and we need to move the hurd.

(It strikes me that tool makers have a big role to play, if we can make tools that build on top of open data, and open publicaitons. Problems that we can help solve include litature )

publishing data, what’s in it for researchers?. (top)

The [Royal Society][rs] report on science as an open enterprise, really hilights the importance of data - but as ever the question is going to be how to convince researchers what is in it for them. Panelst says that the case has already been made, and we should now be takling about how, and not why. I guess that if we just pretend that the case has been made, maybe that really is a viable option. You know, one day we wake up and just look surprised when a researcher says they don’t want to share their data, and then they shake their head and say, oh, I thought I was living in a differnet univers, or something.

JORD and dryad are mentiond. [eLife] already has a paper with data deposited in dryad.

Neil Chu Hong presents the best “one slide” I’ve seen so far, it has about 10 slides worth of content on it, Neil is talking about the journal of open research software, and the cahllenges of getting scientists to use proper tools like version control, and the fact that the incremental benefit for an individual researecher is pretty small. Software is not just data, but there are a lot of things that are similar. (I’ve done a review of a couple of submissions for jors, and it’s interesting, as understanding other people’s code is hard).

The issue of “intellegent openess” is mentioned. It seems to mean well structued openess where objects are made open in a way that allows them to be discovered, and possibly machine read. We are trying to make data connections to eLife articles wasy through our API.

Oh oh, a new thing, I’d not heard of the [PRIME][prime] project before, a meatdata exchange between publishers and repositories, I’ll definitly have a look at that.

The PERPARADE project is mentioned, they are working with the Geoscience Data Jounrnal. (the acronym of PREPARADE is a bit nutty, but the project looks good).

I like the comment from F1000, that when they said to researchers that publishing their data would give them precendence on the data was a very powerful argument.

(At this moment in the discussion I got a little distracted).