Image by cameronneylon via Flickr This post, while only 48 hours old is somewhat outdated by these two Friendfeed discussions. This was written independently of those discussions so it seemed worth putting out in its original form rather than spending too much time rewriting. I wrote recently about Sciencefeed, a Friendfeed like system aimed at scientists and was fairly critical.
I had the great pleasure and privilege of announcing the launch of the Panton Principles at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest on Saturday. The launch of the Panton Principles, many months after they were first suggested is really largely down to the work of Jonathan Gray.
I have long been an advocate of Friendfeed as a great tool for researchers. Here I discuss the new Friendfeed clone built for researchers, ScienceFeed, suggest what it is good for and what its weaknesses are.
Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr It hasn’t been a real good week for peer review.
 Image via Wikipedia Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good practice, or writing decent code.
Towards the end of last year I wrote up some initial reactions to the announcement of Nature Communications and the communications team at NPG were kind enough to do a Q&A to look at some of the issues and concerns I raised. Specifically I was concerned about two things.
A talk given at the Edinburgh University IT Futures meeting late in 2009. The talk discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Wave as a tool for research and provides some pointers on how to think about using it in an academic setting. The talk was recorded in a Wave with members of the audience taking notes around images of the slides which I had previously uploaded.
Nat Torkington, picking up on my post over the weekend about the CRU emails takes a slant which has helped me figure out how to write this post which I was struggling with. He says: As I responded over at Radar, yes I am absolutely calling for social software for scientists, but I didn’t mean to say that we could expect it to help us find the visionaries amongst the simply wrong. But this raises a very helpful question.
Next Tuesday I’m giving a talk at the Institute for Science Ethics and Innovation in Manchester. This is a departure for me in terms of talk subjects, in as much as it is much more to do with policy and politics. I have struggled quite a bit with it so this is an effort to work it out on “paper”. Warning, it’s rather long.
A great deal of excitement but relatively little detailed information thus far has followed the announcement by Nature Publishing Group of a new online only journal with an author-pays open access option. NPG have managed and run a number of open access (although see caveats below) and hybrid journals as well as online only journals for a while now.