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.

Via Open Students via A Blog Around the Clock.

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.

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