The third installment of the paper (first part, second part) where I discuss social issues around practicing more Open Science. Scientists are inherently rather conservative in their adoption of new approaches and tools. A conservative approach has served the community well in the process of sifting ideas and claims;

I had been getting puzzled for a while as to why I was being characterised as an ‘Open Access’ advocate. I mean, I do adovcate Open Access publication and I have opinions on the Green versus Gold debate. I am trying to get more of my publications into Open Access journals. But I’m no expert, and I’ve certainly been around this community for a much shorter time and know a lot less about the detail than many other people.

On Monday 1 September we had a one day workshop in Southampton discussing the issues that surround ‘Open Science’. This was very free form and informal and I had the explicit aim of getting a range of people with different perspectives into the room to discuss a wide range of issues, including tool development, the social and career structure issues, as well as ideas about standards and finally, what concrete actions could actually be taken.

For the Open Science workshop at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing I wrote a very long essay as an introductory paper. It turned out that this was far too long for the space available so an extremely shortened version was submitted for the symposium proceedings. I thought I would post the full length essay in installments here as a prelude to cleaning it up and submitting to an appropriate journal.

So a bit of a first for me. I can vaguely claim to have contributed to two things into the print version of Nature this week. Strictly speaking my involvement in the first, the ‘From the Blogosphere‘ piece on the Science Blogging Challenge, was really restricted to discussing the idea (originally from Richard Grant I believe) and now a bit of cheerleading and ultimately some judging.

I am currently sitting at the dining table of Peter Murray-Rust with Egon Willighagen opposite me talking to Jean-Claude Bradley. We pulling together sets of data from Jean-Claude’s UsefulChem project into CML to make it more semantically rich and do a bunch of cool stuff. Jean-Claude has a recently published preprint on Nature Precedings of a paper that has been submitted to JoVE.

So Michael Nielsen, one morning at breakfast at Scifoo asked one of those questions which never has a short answer; ‘So how did you get into this open science thing?’ and I realised that although I have told the story to many people I haven’t ever written it down.

One of the many great pleasures of SciFoo was to meet with people who had a different, and in many cases much more comprehensive, view of managing data and making it available.

I am too tired to write anything even vaguely coherent. As will have been obvious there was little opportunity for microblogging, I managed to take no video at all, and not even any pictures. It was non-stop, at a level of intensity that I have very rarely encountered anywhere before.

The speaker had started the afternoon with a quote from Ian Rogers, ‘Losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage scale.’ He went on to eloquently, if somewhat bluntly, make the case for exposing data and discuss the importance of making it available in a useable and re-useable form.