Cameron Neylon

I'm a little shell shocked really. I've spent the last couple of weeks
running around like a lunatic, being at meetings, organising meetings,
flying out to other meetings. And then flying back to try and catch up
with all the things that need doing before the next flurry of activity
strikes (which involves less travel and more experiments you will be
pleased to know). There are two things I desperately need to write up.

The [Open Science workshop at
Southampton](http://sotonopensciworkshop.wikispaces.com/) on September 1
seemed to be well received and was certainly interesting for me.Â 
Despite having a very diverse group of people we did seem to manage to
have a sensible discussion that actually came to some conclusions. This
was followed up by discussions with the web publishing group at Nature
where some of these ideas were refined -- more on this will follow!

Following on from this (and with a quick afternoon jaunt to Bristol for
the [Bristol Knowlege
Unconference](http://knowledgeunconference.eventwax.com/bristol-knowledge-unconference)
on the evening of September 5 I flew to Toronto en route to Waterloo for
[Science in the 21st Century](http://www.science21stcentury.org/),
allowing for a brief stop for a Nature Network Toronto [pub night panel
session](http://network.nature.com/forums/toronto/2368) with [Jen
Dodd](http://jendodd.com/), [Michael
Nielsen](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/), and [Timo
Hannay](http://network.nature.com/profile/timo). The organisers of
Science21, but in particular [Sabine
Hossenfelder](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/), deserve huge
congratulations for putting together one of the most diverse and
exciting conferences I have ever been to. With speakers from historians
to sociologists, hedge fund managers to writers, and even the odd
academic scientist the sheer breadth of material covered was quite
breathtaking.

You can see most of the talks and associated material on the [Perimeter
Institute Seminar Archive](http://pirsa.org/) page
[here](http://pirsa.org/C08021). The friendfeed commentary is also
available in the [science21
room](http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science21). Once again it was a great
pleasure to meet people I kind of knew but hadn't ever actually met such
as [Greg Wilson](http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/) and [John
Dupuis](http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/) as well as to meet new people
including (but by no means limited to) [Harry
Collins](http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/academicstaff/C-D/professor-harry-collins-overview.html),
[Paul Guinnessy](http://www.ostina.org/content/view/2024/), and [David
Kaiser](http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/). We have yet to establish
whether I knew [Jen Dodd](http://jendodd.com/) in a previous life...

Very many ideas will come out of this meeting I think -- and I have no
doubt you will see some interesting blog posts from others with the
science21 tag coming out over the next few weeks and months. A couple of
particular things I will try to follow up on;

- Harry Collins [spoke about](http://pirsa.org/08090033/)
  categorisations of tacit (i.e. non-communicated) knowledge and how
  these relate to different categories of expertise. This has obvious
  implications for our mission to describe our experiments to a level
  where there is 'no insider information'. The idea that we may be able
  to rationally describe what we can and cannot expect to be able to
  communicate and that we can therefore concentrate on the things that
  we can is compelling.
- Greg Wilson [made a strong case](http://pirsa.org/08090037/) for the
  fully supported experiment that echoed my own thoughts about the
  recording of data analysis procedures. He was focussed on
  computational science but I think his point goes much wider than that.
  This requires some thought and processing but for me it is clear that
  the big challenge in communicating the details of our experiments now
  clearly lies in communicating *process* rather than data.

Each of these deserves its own post and will hopefully get it. And I am
also aware that I owe many of you comments, replies, or other things --
some more urgent than others. I'll be getting to them as soon as I can
dig myself out from under this pile of......


I’m a little shell shocked really. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks running around like a lunatic, being at meetings, organising meetings, flying out to other meetings.

The long slow catchup…

So far weâ€™ve had a fun week.
[Jean-Claude](http://usefulchem.blogspot.com) arrived in the UK on
Thursday last, followed up with a talk at [Bath
University](http://www.bath.ac.uk) to people at
[UKOLN](http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/) on Friday. The talk kicked off an
extended conversation which meant we were very late to lunch but it was
great to follow up on issues from a different perspective to that.
Jean-Claude will be making a screencast of the talk available on his
[Drexel-CoAs Podcast
blog](http://drexel-coas-talks-mp3-podcast.blogspot.com/).

On Friday afternoon we headed into London in preparation for Science
Blogging 2008 which was a blast. A very entertaining keynote by Ben
Goldacre of [Bad Science](http://www.badscience.net/) was followed up by
a fascinating series of sessions on everything from Open Notebooks to
connecting up conversations separated in time and space to
[creativity](http://friendfeed.com/e/2d29c912-a146-467d-a680-5c3ec2c11db9/break-out-session-creativity-things-you-can-t-do/),
blogging boredom, and unicycling giraffes. The sessions were great fun
and there was lots of [back chat on
friendfeed](http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science-blogging-2008) but in
many ways the best part of this for me was the chance to meet people (if
in many cases very briefly) that I knew well but had never actually met
in person. Too many to mention all but in particular it was a pleasure
to finally meet [Michael Barton](http://www.michaelbarton.me.uk/),
[Richard Grant](http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/rpg), [Heather
Etchevers](http://humans.scienceboard.net/), [Matt
Wood](http://www.greenisgood.co.uk/), [Graham
Steel](http://mcblawg.blogspot.com/), and many people from NPG as well
as to meet many old friends. There is pretty good coverage of the
meeting itself so I will simply point at the [technorati
tag](http://technorati.com/search/sciblog?authority=a4&language=en) and
be done with that.

I was one of the people on the [final
panel](http://sciencegeekspeak.com/2008/08/31/final-panel-podcast-from-science-blogging-conference/)
with Peter Murray-Rust, Richard Grant, and moderation from Timo Hannay.
This was a fun conversation with lots of different perspectives. I think
the overall conclusion was that the idea that â€˜blogging is bad for
your careerâ€™ is shifting towards â€˜why do you put all this work
in?â€™ There was a strong sense that some people had made real personal
gains out of blogging and online activities and that many organisations
are starting to see it as a valuable contribution. Nonetheless it is not
an activity that is widely valued, or indeed even known about. To this
end the panel offered a challenge â€" to persuade a senior scientist to
start writing a blog. One prize will be to be featured in next yearâ€™s
Open Lab 2008 â€" the best of science writing on the web. The other
prize â€" which caused an extensive collective intake of breath â€" will
be an all expenses paid trip to Scifoo next year for both blogger and
the encourager. The announcement will probably be made with details by
the time I get to post this.

In the pub on the Saturday night, Peter M-R grabbed me and JC and Egon
Willighagen and said â€˜why donâ€™t you come up to Cambridge
tomorrow?â€™ So we all did [and
I](http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/08/31/linking-up-open-science-online/)
and [Egon have
written](http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2008/08/ugichem2cml.html)
briefly about that already. More work to do, and some interesting things
to discuss, which I hope to follow up later.

Sunday afternoon- dash back to Southampton for the introductory dinner
for the [Open Science
Workshop](http://sotonopensciworkshop.wikispaces.com/) held at
Southampton Uni on Monday. This was a really great meeting from my
perspective with a real mix of tools people and â€˜practicingâ€™
scientists, computer scientists, chemists, biologists, and people with
business degrees. There is more at [the
Wiki](http://sotonopensciworkshop.wikispaces.com/) and [on
Friendfeed](http://friendfeed.com/rooms/soton-open-science-workshop-1-9-08)
â€" but this will need a write up of its own. Hopefully slides will be
made available for most of the talks and we will point to them from both
Wiki and Friendfeed.

Tuesday, more meetings and planning, with a great meeting with [Dave De
Roure](http://www.soton.ac.uk/~dder/) of Southampton Electronics and
Computer Science and in particular the PI for the
[MyExperiment](http://www.myexperiment.org) project.Â  Some good stuff
will come out of this â€" and the contact between Dave and
[Chemspider](http://www.chemspider.com) has been made. The MyExperiment
team are keen on delivering more for chemistry so that link will be
important. However I was particularly taken with a throw away comment
Dave made that workflows (and makefiles) have a direct equivalence with
spreadsheets. This made me think immediately of that great divide
between â€˜those who use excel for everythingâ€™ and â€˜those who run
screaming in the other direction and would rather hard code in perl on a
clay tabletâ€™ for analysis. If we could actually leverage the vast
number of analytical spread sheets sitting on a million hard drives we
might be able to do some very interesting stuff. Hopefully more on this
in a future post.

Wednesday we did [some
experiments](http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp207) â€" its mostly up
online now so you can go see if you are interested. And today we are
heading up to London to see the folks at Nature Publishing Group which
should be fun. More opportunity to talk in detail about ideas from
Saturday and the role of the publisher and papers in the future.Â  Had a
lovely lunch with the NPG web publishing people, talks seemed to go
reasonably well, and a quick chat with the people from Nature Chemistry

But it doesnâ€™t stop there. Tomorrow JC goes to [Manchester to give a
talk](http://duncan.hull.name/2008/08/26/open-notebook-science-in-manchester/),
then heads to Edinburgh for the [e-Science All Hands
Meeting](http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/), including a workshop on
â€˜[The Global Data Centric
View](http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/programme/workshop9.cfm)â€™. Then
he heads to Oxford for [another
meeting](http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/events/oii-oxford-e-research-conference-2008)Â 
and [talk](http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/eresearch08/programme.cfm)
before finally heading back to Philadelphia. On Sunday I fly to Toronto,
with a [Nature Network pub
session](http://network.nature.com/groups/toronto/notice/2008/09/02/next-pub-night-with-discussion-panel-on-science-2-0-featuring-timo-hannay-and-michael-nielsen)
on the Sunday evening (wow I am going to be on scintillating form for
that!) followed by [Science in the 21^st^
Century](http://www.science21stcentury.org/) for the following week.

I think we are going to need a rest when we get to our respective homes
againâ€¦


So far weâ€™ve had a fun week. Jean-Claude arrived in the UK on Thursday last, followed up with a talk at Bath University to people at UKOLN on Friday. The talk kicked off an extended conversation which meant we were very late to lunch but it was great to follow up on issues from a different perspective to that. Jean-Claude will be making a screencast of the talk available on his Drexel-CoAs Podcast blog.

The Open Science Endurance Event  – Team JC-C

[![Perimiter
Institute](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/207/514767001_51c8268f11_m.jpg){decoding="async"}](http://www.flickr.com/photos/45842966@N00/514767001)Perimeter
Institute by
[hungryhungrypixels](http://www.flickr.com/photos/45842966@N00/514767001)
(Picture found by Zemanta).

[Sabine Hossenfelder](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/) and [Michael
Nielsen](http://michaelnielsen.org/) of the [Perimeter Institute for
Theoretical
Physics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perimeter_Institute_for_Theoretical_Physics "Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics"){rel="wikipedia"}
are organising a conference called '[Science in the 21st
Century](http://www.science21stcentury.org/)' which was inspired in part
by [SciBarCamp](http://www.scibarcamp.org/). I am honoured, and not a
little daunted, to have been asked to speak considering the star studded
[line up of
speakers](http://www.science21stcentury.org/participants.html)
including, well lots of really interesting people, read [the
list](http://http://www.science21stcentury.org/participants.html). The
meeting looks to be a really interesting mix of science, tools, and how
these interact with people (and scientists). I'm looking forward to it.

I am currently trying to figure out how I can manage both to get to
Ontario and be at the [UK E-science All Hands
Meeting](http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/programme/call.cfm) as well.
But in the meantime we have been asked to kick off the discussion and
get some abstracts together. Here is a first draft and we will see how
it evolves over time. Should I aim to be more controversial?

**Science in the open *or* How I learned to stop worrying and love the
blog**

Vast sums of money, probably of the order of \$US200 billion, are spent
annually by national government agencies and charities on scientific
research. Yet despite the sums invested and despite the requirement to
demonstrate 'Economic Impact' rising up the political agenda very little
critical analysis is made of the *efficiency* of scientific research in
generating its desired outputs. A large proportion of all scientific
research is never made public and the vast majority is not made
available to other scientists in a timely manner.

The thesis of the 'Open Science Movement' is that by making data,
results, and protocols freely available to the research community for
use and re-use a step change in the efficiency of science practice can
be achieved and there is a growing interest in some sectors of the
academic research community in adopting more 'open' approaches to
research practice. These range from publishing in the open access
literature, through research discussions on message boards to discussing
the details of their research on blogs. The logical extreme of these
approaches is '[Open Notebook
Science](http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2006/09/open-notebook-science.html)';
a term coined by Jean-Claude Bradley to describe making the researcher's
laboratory notebook freely available online. It is even possible to
carry out the preparation of a research grant in public. While the
application of Open Science approaches remains limited in academic
research they nonetheless raise serious questions about the value of the
current academic reward structure, and the future of both research
publication and peer review, in their current form. Responses to the
advocacy of 'Open Science' therefore, understandably, run the gamut from
fanatical support, through amused tolerance, to derision and, in some
cases, extreme hostility.

In this talk I will give practical examples of Open Science practice,
and discuss the experience of adopting Open Science practices in my own
research group and the state and usefulness of tools available to
support these approaches with a focus on the tools being used within my
group, being developed in collaboration with the [Frey
group](http://www.soton.ac.uk/~jgfchem/) at the [University of
Southampton](http://www.soton.ac.uk), to support Open Notebook Science.
I will also show that many of these ideas can be adopted and can enhance
scientific research without, necessarily, adopting all of them all the
time. While there is a need for trail blazers there are elements of
these practices that can benefit any research operation.

[![](http://img.zemanta.com/pixie.png?x-id=14534005-b898-4c57-b01d-0f104b48bf86){decoding="async"}](http://www.zemanta.com/ "Zemified by Zemanta")


Perimeter Institute by hungryhungrypixels (Picture found by Zemanta).  Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics are organising a conference called ‘Science in the 21st Century’ which was inspired in part by SciBarCamp.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

The long slow catchup…

The Open Science Endurance Event – Team JC-C

Science in the 21st Century