Partially Attended

TL;DR OA publishing is maturing with a scalable business model that all the big publishers are jumping all over. Money will be made (but less than before), and more content will be more open. The poor lamentable nay-sayers who carp on unheard in the darkness will be forgotten, and their Cassandra-like predictions will fade to be recalled as little more than the mutterings of fools (OK, that last bit is probably opinion). ... (more)

Michael Nielson Keynote on Open Science He rightly points out that he is probably going to be talking to the converted, so his talk is aimed at looking for resources that can help us to find answers about how to make open science works. He starts talking about an example of failure in open science. his example is an open notebook science from Tobias J Osbourne. He built up a readership of about 100 readers on a highly technical field, but he was not getting much participation, and very little feedback. ... (more)

Session on engaging with peer review This is a very nice panel discussion. For my money there are a number of key points that arose during the discussion: discussions with the public needs to happen where the public is being half assed about engaging the public discourse around papers, and then hiding behind peer review when you run into criticism is really bad, as for example what happened with the arsenic story nasa and science the public needs to be educated that peer review is not binary peer review comments should be made public (not everyone agrees) where we have representations of papers we should look to link to conversations about those papers (trackbacks and so forth) There is a very interesting comment in the Q&A from [Martin Fenner][mf] about peer review in clinical medicine. ... (more)

Introduction So this is a short TalkFest event looking at the public, communities and online science. I’m sure there will be plenty of online discussion around this topic, below are some very rough notes that I took during the event. It was very enjoyable. The people on the panel are D. Amy Sanders from the Welcome Trust, Rob Simpson, (a.k.a OrbitingFrog), Linda Davies and Stephen Cury. The panel was convened by Alice Bell ... (more)

I just read the brief article by Paul Ginsparg about 20 years of the ArXiV. I think the article is a must read for anyone who is thinking about scientific communication. It’s short, and very readable. The things that stand out for me from this article are the following: There are real costs associated with running services on the web. Ginsparg originally imagined that the service that he created could run automatically and that he would be able to get back to his research projects very quickly. ... (more)

Tonight there was a lovely sameas event on the topic of serendipity. I’d stared a blog post about this back in May as a response to to a post that Frank Norman wrote about enablining serendipidous discovery in the digital library. Well, that post kind of lingered, malingered in my drafts directory, so I thought I’d best get on get something out there, spurred on by the event tonight. I studied in Edinburgh for a few years, it’s a beautiful city, and in the heart of the old town Victoria Street sweeps in a steep curve down to the cowgate. ... (more)

Google’s homepage cartoon today tells me that it’s Robert Bunsen’s birthday. He is famous for the invention of the burner named after him, but his contribution to our understanding of the universe around us runs much much deeper than that. He co-created the science of spectroscopy with Gustav Kirchhoff. This is something I learned about when I was living for a while in Heidelberg, one of the university building’s along the Hauptstrasse is named after Bunsen. ... (more)

2010-11-04 sits Right, the meeting is starting, it’s an open meeting, so we don’t have a specific agenda, but as the day goes on topics for discussion will emerge, and these will be time-boxed for discussion. As the participation list is available on the eventbrite site, I’m not going to capture that here. Some topics from the last meeting signatures on digital objects correct identifiers on digital objects author identifiers lightweight languages toolsets sword, sword2 Some potential topics for this meeting authentication and access control rdf and linked data within institutions and repositories data curation reasonable workflow components, best practices lightweight tool sharing web archiving sustainable storage tool sharing data curation, big data, and what the concept of curation means for repositories ... (more)

Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson, and Xin Fu Rodden, Hutchinson and Fu describe a framework for measuring the user experience of web apps through mining server logs. Since they are based at Google one assumes that the framework that they are describing has been battle tested. They focus on metrics that measure user centric aspects of the online experience, in contrast to business centric (such as PULSE metrics: Page-views, Uptime, Latency, Seven day actives, Earnings). ... (more)

I’m reading a fascinating book about the Wittgenstein family. It’s called House Wittgenstein, a family a war. The book main focuses on Paul Wittgenstein, the left armed concert pianist, nonetheless there are many things detailed in this book that have dramatically informed my opinion on both Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy. Two things I want to mention here, firstly much of Ludwig’s approach to life was influenced by Tolstoy’s work The Gospel in Brief (The parallels between the two works are drawn out very nicely here), secondly Wittgenstein’s close family constantly refer to him as being a saint in their personal correspondences. ... (more)