Cameron Neylon

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. As I pulled out my new Macbook (13â€? 2.4 GHz, 4 Gb memory since
you ask) he leaned across to have a good look, as you do, and we struck
up a conversation. He asked what I did and I talked a little about being
a scientist and my role at work. He was a consultant who worked on
systems integration.  
At some stage he made a throwaway comment about the fact that he had
been going back to learn or re-learn some fairly advanced statistics and
that he had had a lot of trouble getting access to some academic papers,
certainly he didn't want to pay for them, but had managed to find free
versions of what he wanted online. I managed to keep my mouth somewhat
shut at this point, except to say I had been at a workshop looking at
these issues. However it gets better, much better. He was looking into
quantitative risk issues and this lead into a discussion about the
problems of how science and particularly medicine reporting in the media
doesn't provide links back to the original research (which is generally
not accessible anyway) and that, what is worse, the original data is
usually not available (and this was all unprompted by me, honestly!). To
paraphrase his comment â€œthe trouble with science is that I can't get
at the numbers behind the headlines; what is the sample size, how was
the trial run...â€? Well at this point, all thought of getting any work
done went out the window and we had a great discussion about data
availability, the challenges of recording it in the right form (his
systems integration work includes efforts to deal with mining of large,
badly organised data sets), drifted into identity management and trust
networks and was a great deal of fun.  
What do I take from this? That there is a a demand for this kind of
information and data from an educated and knowledgable public. One of
the questions he asked was whether as a scientist I ever see much in the
way of demand from the public. My response was that, aside from pushing
the taxpayer access to taxpayer funded research myself, I hadn't seen
much evidence of real demand. His argument was that there is a huge
nascent demand there from people who haven't thought about their need to
get into the detail of news stories that effect them. People want the
detail, they just have no idea of how to go about getting it. Spread the
idea that access to that detail is a right and we will see the demand
for access to the outputs of research grow rapidly. The idea that
"no-one out there is interested or competent to understand the details"
is simply not true. The more respect we have for the people who fund our
research the better frankly.


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.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

The people you meet on the train…