Cameron Neylon

I'm in Barcelona at a satellite meeting of the EuroScience Open Forum
organised by Science Commons and a number of their partners.Â  Today is
when most of the meeting will be with forums on 'Open Access Today',
'Moving OA to the Scientific Enterprise:Data, materials, software',
'Open access in the the knowledge network', and 'Open society, open
science: Principle and lessons from OA'. There is also a keynote from
Carlos Morais-Pires of the European Commission and the lineup for the
panels is very impressive.

Last night was an introduction and social kickoff as well. James Boyle
(Duke Law School, Chair of board of directors of Creative Commons,
Founder of Science commons) gave a wonderful talk (40 minutes, no
slides, barely taking breath) where his central theme was the
relationship between where we are today with open science and where
international computer networks were in 1992. He likened making the case
for open science today with that of people suggesting in 1992 that the
networks would benefit from being made freely accessible, freely
useable, and based on open standards. The fears that people have today
of good information being lost in a deluge of dross, of their being
large quantities of nonsense, and nonsense from people with an agenda,
can to a certain extent be balanced against the idea that to put it
crudely, that Google works. As James put it (not quite a direct quote)
'You need to reconcile two statements; both true. 1) 99% of all material
on the web is incorrect, badly written, and partial. 2) You probablyÂ 
haven't opened an encylopedia as a reference in ten year.

James gave two further examples, one being the availability of legal
data in the US. Despite the fact that none of this is copyrightable in
the US there are thriving businesses based on it. The second, which I
found compelling, for reasons that Peter Murray-Rust has described in
some detail. Weather data in the US is free. In a recent attempt to get
long term weather data a research effort was charged on the order of
\$1500, the cost of the DVDs that would be needed to ship the data, for
all existing US weather data. By comparison a single German state wanted
millions for theirs. The consequence of this was that the European data
didn't go into the modelling. James made the point that while the
European return on investment for weather data was a respectable
nine-fold, that for the US (where they are giving it away remember) was
32 times. To me though the really compelling part of this argument is if
that data is not made available we run the risk of being underwater in
twenty years with nothing to eat. This particular case is not about
money, it is potentially about survival.

Finally -- and this you will not be surprised was the bit I most liked
-- he went on to issue a call to arms to get on and start building this
thing that we might call the data commons. The time has come to actually
sit down and start to take these things forward, to start solving the
issues of reward structures, of identifying business models, and to
build the tools and standards to make this happen. That, he said was the
job for today. I am looking forward to it.

I will attempt to do some updates via twitter/friendfeed (cameronneylon
on both) but I don't know how well that will work. I don't have a
roaming data tariff and the charges in Europe are a killer so it may be
a bit sparse.


I’m in Barcelona at a satellite meeting of the EuroScience Open Forum organised by Science Commons and a number of their partners.Â

Policy and technology for e-science – A forum on on open science policy

One thing that we have been thinking about a bit recently is how best to
link elements of a peer reviewed paper back to an Open Notebook. There
are a number of issues that this raises, both technical and
philosophical about how and why we might do this. Our first motivation
is to provide access to the raw data if people want it. The dream here
is that by clicking on a graph you are taken straight through to
processed data which you can then backtrack through to get to the raw
data itself. This is clearly some way off.

Other simple solutions are to provide a hyperlink back to the open
notebook, or to an index page that describes the experiment, how it was
done, and how the data was processed. Publishers are always going to
have an issue with this because they can't rely on the stability of
external material. So the other solution is to package up a version of
the notebook and provide it as supplementary information. This could
still provide links back to the 'real' notebook but provides additional
stability and also protects the data against disaster by duplicating it.

The problem with this is that many journals will only accept pdf. While
we can process a notebook to provide a package which is wrapped up as
pdf this has a lot of limitations particularly when it comes to data
scraping, which after all we want to encourage. An encouraging
development was recently described on the [BioMedCentral
Blog](http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/) where they
describe the capability of [uploading a 'mini website' as supplementary
information](http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/additional_material_gets_additional_features "Link to BioMedCentral Blog post").
This is great as we can build a static version of our notebook, with
lots of lovely rich metadata built in. We can point out to the original
notebook and we can point in from the original notebook back to the
paper. I am supposed to be working on a paper at the moment which I was
considering where to send. I hope we can give [BMC
Biotechnology](http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbiotechnol/) or perhaps
[BMC Research Notes](http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcresnotes/) a go to
test this out.


One thing that we have been thinking about a bit recently is how best to link elements of a peer reviewed paper back to an Open Notebook. There are a number of issues that this raises, both technical and philosophical about how and why we might do this.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Policy and technology for e-science – A forum on on open science policy

Connecting Open Notebook data to a peer reviewed paper