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About a week ago, I had the pleasure of attending Science Hack Day with about 150 other scientists and hackers. It was an amazingly fun event with people from all over the world coming together to build cool, quirky, and otherwise awesome things over the span of a weekend. It’s a sort of high holy day for geeks like me, so I was especially thrilled that Mendeley was able to be a sponsor this year. It was also fun spending quality time with some of the PLoS developers and collaborating on a fun hack. Here’s some of the highlights: (more…)

Update: Archive of the show can be viewed or downloaded from here http://odtv.me/2009/08/dr-kikis-science-hour-14/

This Thursday I’ll be joining the managing editor of PLoS ONE, Pete Binfield, live on Science Hour hosted by Leo Laporte and Dr. Kiki.

We’ll be discussing the future of academic publishing, science on the Web, or anything else that comes up.

Those in the U.S. might recognize Leo from his nationally syndicated radio show “The Tech Guy.” We will broadcast from Leo’s live studio just outside San Francisco.

Participate: OK Mendelians, now is your chance to ask all of the important questions you have been saving up. What does Victor eat for lunch? Does the Mendeley dev team room smell? What exactly does the Mendeley logo represent?

Or, you can ask a few more serious questions.

Join the chat room to ask questions or just watch what others are commenting on. The chat room can be found on the same page as the broadcast. Please join so that I don’t just get questions from my mom, who I know will be watching. Sorry, Mom.

Where: http://live.twit.tv/
Audio only broadcast: http://twit.am/listen.m3u
Time: 3:00PM Pacific Time (11:00PM UK) on August 27, 2009

Rebroadcast: iTunes or ODTV a few days later

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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:

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After releasing support for PLoS – Public Library of Science last week we now updated our web importer again to support single article and search result pages for EBSCO Host and ISI Web of Knowledge. Just visit our importer page to add the bookmarklet to your browser.