With advances in sequencing technologies leading to a so-called “data deluge”, the amount of data supporting a biological study is becoming increasingly unwieldy and difficult to make available. These issues have led to a lack of transparency in analyses of sequencing data, resulting in an ever-increasing reproducibility gap.

A couple of days ago I posted specifically about the data re-use session. I’m going to use this post to muse about the conference more generally. About SpotOn London 2012 It used to be called Science Online London – an informative, sensible and appropriate name. This year I hear (rumours) that it had to change name to SpotOn because Science AAAS or some other litigious entity was claiming brand identity infringement.

So there’s been a few already: SpotOn day 1 &

Wow! Where to begin… In this post I shall attempt to summarise some of OKFestival 2012. Some Background: I had been to the Open Knowledge Conference last year (in Berlin), where I gave an invited talk on Open Palaeontology and met lots of brilliant people in the Open Science community like Bjoern Brembs, Cameron Neylon & Peter Murray-Rust.

In the midst of a busy few weeks of European meetings, GigaScience is currently in Basel, where ECCB 2012 (the European Conference of Computational Biology) has just ended. Usually overshadowed by its bigger sibling: the ISMB (particularly when both meetings are in Europe and co-hosted), this was the first time that I had attended the stand-alone meeting and it more than justified being a stand-alone event.

Since Sunday afternoon I’ve been at an International Council for Science (ICSU) / Royal Society invited workshop on ‘Revaluing Science in the Digital Age’. We’ve had a fascinating set of talks from academics, publishers (PLoS, Nature, BMC), librarians, policymakers, data managers, scientific societies… Attendees included: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buneman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boulton Jose Cotta, European

I just sent this email to Darin Croft (of SVP). I chose to contact him because he recently answered questions about the embargo for EmbargoWatch and it was rather unclear who else I should approach. I did not want to blanket email the whole council.

Sometimes you just have to laugh… The year is 2012, we have the internet, we have blogs, and a huge variety of other tools to enable free, efficient and rapid communication of information and yet the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting rules still insist that all information within this year’s abstract booklet remain a big secret until the day of the event. Many others have justly written to complain about this before.

Scientific workflow software such as Taverna, Knime and Pipeline Pilot can overcome interoperability issues relating to the access of tools and data format conversions. Such tasks are automatically handled by the data processing pipeline during its enactment by the workflow software. Galaxy is another workflow system, and its annual conference was held last month at the University of Chicago.

Type any scientific term into any search engine and its pretty much guaranteed that a Wikipedia article will be the first hit.