Together with Richard P. Grant/F1000 and Virginia Barbour/PloS, I also gave a talk on “Real-Time Metrics in Science” – it went rather well until, five minutes into the discussion, an iPhone alarm started to ring and its owner didn’t stop it for a full 5 minutes. All told however, it was great fun – and we’ve vowed to return with Science Online London 2010 next year!
Without further ado, here are my 30 favourite pictures of the merry proceedings. Curiously, both the FringeFrivolous and the Solo09 set end with Gulliver, the BioMedCentral Turtle.
Last evening I attended a panel discussion entitled, “Making the Web work for Science” hosted by Science Commons. It was held at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and moderated by Tim O’Reilly. On the panel were Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Stephen Friend, MD, PhD President, CEO and a Co-Founder of Sage; and John Wilbanks, VP of Science at Creative Commons.
While I was hoping more would be discussed on modeling the habits of researchers with web tools, the focus on Open Science was still a good conversation. At one point, Dr. Friend mentioned the need to publish negative results. With the ability to inexpensively self-publish and distribute data on the Web, why then, aren’t we seeing more of this?
Trying to answer from my own experience as a researcher, there are at least three reasons, or rather fears:
Exciting news: Jason Hoyt, the founder of Ologeez (a semantic frontend for PubMed), is joining Mendeley! Jason holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University. At the moment, he is still based in Palo Alto, but once the visa issues are sorted out, Jason will be joining us here in London as our new Research Director. TechCrunch broke the story today with a headline that made our geek hearts beat faster, comparing us to a Klingon battle cruiser de-cloaking in London.
To get started, Jason wrote up his reasons for joining us, and how Mendeley can help change the Impact Factor. Over to him:
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Changing the Journal Impact Factor
Right, so the first thing I had to ask myself was “Why on earth would I move from San Francisco, leaving behind a cushy life for London, and work for a reference management start-up?” Surely any rational person would find this a bit odd.
Well, I’m not going to answer by talking about how great the team is or how enthusiastic the founders are about improving research, which is certainly all true. Rather, let’s take a real-world example of how the “tech” behind Mendeley is already making a difference with how we view the impact factors of research.
Happy New Year from everyone at Team Mendeley! We’re excited to be back from the holidays and buzzing with ideas. We’ve got a couple of newsworthy bits, but that’s for another post.
This one is about a research proposal we submitted in December, trying to get selected by the Research Information Network for a commissioned study on the “Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers” (Mendeley, anyone?). It was a joint effort with Gavin Baker/SPARC, Jonathan Gray/Open Knowledge Foundation, Niall Haslam/European Molecular Biology Lab, Liz Lyon/UKOLN and Cameron Neylon/Science and Technology Facilities Council. As the lone social scientist on the team, my main task would have been to oversee the empirical survey and conduct the statistical analysis and structural equation modelling.
Unfortunately for us, even though we were invited into the final round of presentations at RIN, our bid did not get selected. I can understand (and agree with) the reasoning that RIN gave us – they thought we had a great team and compelling methodology, but we hadn’t given as much thought to the nuts and bolts of the project management as they would have liked. Nonetheless, it was a great learning experience (Gavin has blogged about this, too), and I genuinely enjoyed working out the proposal with the other team members. Getting into the final round wasn’t too shabby either, considering that none of us had ever written a proposal for such a research tender.
In the spirit of Web 2.0 collaboration and sharing, our team had planned to make our proposal (and had we been selected, our ongoing work and raw data) public for everyone to access and re-use. So here’s the proposal we submitted:
After writing so much about the other fun speeches, sessions, and things to do at the ESOF2008, I didn’t manage to talk about our own session, “Euroscience’s Interactive Workshop: Development of a virtual network custom designed for scientists”, which took place on Monday afternoon.
The sessions was started off by Professors Peter Westh and Roberto Poli, who each presented their vision for an interdisciplinary network for researchers. In their view, ontologies and semantic knowledge will play a key part in establishing a useful network that is not merely a “Facebook for scientists”, but helps to connect researchers through highlighting common areas of interest or – as Prof. Westh emphasized – possible new applications of existing knowledge.
That, of course, was music to our ears. We’ve talked about our “Mendeley = Last.fm for research” vision before on this blog, but the EuroScience workshop was the perfect venue for tossing the idea around a bit further. After all, Last.fm has managed to create the largest ontological classification (and the largest open database) of music in the world, by aggregating the musical tastes of its 20 million users and then data-mining it for similar musical genres, artists, and songs.
So our presentation was aimed at exploring how these principles could be applied to research. You can find an abridged version below! I tried my best at voiceover narration, but doing it in front of my computer at midnight just doesn’t turn out as lively as standing in front of an audience:
After the talk, we got great feedback from the audience. The panel moderator, Jens Degett, even wondered whether we just might have solved the major problem of Open Access – the researchers’ lack of participation: With Mendeley, researchers have an increased incentive to post their articles online, because it enables them track the evolution of their readership in real-time!
One of the audience members who came up to us after the presentation was Anders Norgaard, a Ph.D. student from Denmark who had some cool suggestions for future features. We also talked about open sourcing Mendeley Desktop, and I mentioned to him that we had three KDE developers on our team. This is the dialog that ensued:
Anders: Oh, really? What are their names?
Me: Well, there’s Mike Arthur…
Anders: Mike Arthur? I know him, he’s quite famous in the KDE scene!
Me: …and Fred Emmott…
Anders: Fred Emmott? The guy who’s doing Slamd64?!
Me: …yes, and Robert Knight will be starting next Monday…
Anders: Robert Knight?! He’s famous, too! How did you manage to get those guys?
Well, the credit goes to Mike. I knew that we had brilliant engineers on our team, but I was clueless that they were actually famous… Mike, Fred, Robert – I tip my hat to you guys!
I wanted to write up Part II of our EuroScience Adventures today, but unfortunately, I didn’t manage to – look out for them tomorrow! However, I came across a very interesting (and, at the risk of sounding pompous, important) video today.
It describes how Chris Boulton’s thesis was repeatedly turned down for publication because its data contained copyrighted material (excerpts from fashion ads), the use of which should have fallen under the “fair use” doctrine.
For scholars who study media, the internet has broadened research horizons and expanded the reach of teaching and publications. But powerful gatekeepers remain. From academic journals seeking to control our intellectual property to lawyers crying foul when we quote from copyrighted material, we are bombarded with a myriad of confusing and dubious restrictions. In short, the implied threat of legal action creates a chilling effect that impacts us all. Some have pushed back, arguing that our educational activities are protected under the “fair use” statute. But this is a risky game to play. The rules aren’t always clear. And when it comes to fair use, we either use it, or lose it.
By chance, I stumbled across One Big Lab yesterday, a very interesting blog on Open Science maintained by (as far as I can tell) four Stanford bioinformatics Ph.D. students. One of the many gems to be discovered there is a series of t-shirt designs called “Worst. Result. Ever.”:
You’ve been there, done that. Spent hours, days, weeks… months?… just to discover that your hypothesis (or “hope-othesis”) is completely wrong. Finished a data analysis only to see that what you’ve just produced can only be described as the Worst. Result. Ever. [...]
Each one is named after the hapless student who had the pleasure of seeing something very much like it in their own research.
I’ve had nightmares of the Magda, and once pulled a Bernie, too. Once the shirts become available, buying them will support the PSB workshop on Open Science in… what? Hawaii?! I need to go there!
Occasionally, our blog will highlight research which we personally find interesting.
What I enjoyed most about my Ph.D. dissertation, and research in general, was that it enabled me to spend a lot of time just reading stuff that I found utterly fascinating.
ving behind a cushy life for London, and work for a reference management start-up?” Surely any rational person would find this a bit odd.
