I should be putting something together for the actual sessions I am notionally involved in helping running but this being a very interactive meeting perhaps it is better to leave things to very last minute. Currently I am at a hotel at LAX awaiting an early flight tomorrow morning.

In a few hours I will be giving a short presentation to the whole of the PSB conference on the workshop that we ran on Monday. We are still thinking through the details of what has come out of this and hopefully the discussion will continue in any case so this is a personal view. The slides for the presentation are available at Slideshare. To me there were a couple of key points that came out.

Just a very brief rundown of what happened at the workshop this morning and some central themes that came out of it. The slides from the talks are available on Slideshare and recorded video from most of the talks (unfortunately not Dave de Roure‘s or Phil Bourne‘s at the moment) is available on my Mogulus channel (http://www.mogulus.com/cameron_neylon – click on Video on Demand and select the PSB folder). The commentary from the conference is

As I noted in the last post we are rapidly counting down towards the final few days before the Open Science Workshop at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. I am flying out from Sydney to Hawaii this afternoon and may or may not have network connectivity in the days leading up the meeting. So just some quick notes here on where you can find any final information if you are coming or if you want to follow online.

All good traditions require someone to make an arbitrary decision to do something again. Last year I threw up a few New Year’s resolutions in the hours before NYE in the UK. Last night I was out on the shore of Sydney Harbour. I had the laptop – I thought about writing something – and then I thought – nah I can just lie here and look at the pretty lights.

Yesterday on the train I had a most remarkable experience of synchronicity. I had been at the RIN workshop on the costs of scholarly publishing (more on that later) in London and was heading of to Oxford for a group dinner. On the train I was looking for a seat with a desk and took one up opposite a guy with a slightly battered looking mac laptop.

…but being straightforward is always the best approach. Since we published our paper in PLoS ONE a few months back I haven’t been as happy as I was about the activity of our Sortase. What this means is that we are now using a higher concentration of the enzyme to do our ligation reactions. They seem to be working well and with high yields, but we need to put in more enzyme.

For anyone in the UK who lives under a stone, or those people elsewhere in the world who don’t follow British news, this week there has been at least some news beyond the ongoing economic crisis and a U.S. election. Two media ‘personalities’ have been excoriated for leaving what can only be described as crass and offensive messages on an elderly actor’s answer phone, while on air.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is running a workshop on finding and re-using open science resources. More details are available on the okf blog and wiki. I will be there along with a number of more interesting and important people. Come along and contribute to the discussion of how we can use what’s out there and how we can get a lot more of it.

This is the fourth and final part of the serialisation of a draft paper on Open Science. The other parts are here – Part I – Part II – Part III A question that needs to be asked when contemplating any major change in practice is the balance and timing of ‘bottom up’ versus ‘top-down’ approaches for achieving that change.