Some responses to John Wood’s talk on e-science infrastructure at AHM2007. The talk focussed on large scale infrastructure and the need for co-ordination. There are serious political and logistical problems for making proper coordination happen. A couple of interesting comments came out; Need for the involvement of historians and sociologists to follow what is happening.

Some themes seem to emerge to me from the talks I have been to. One is that the many people are talking about the need to expand the reach of e-science tools out to the ‘general scientific community’.  As I noted in other posts part of this is a problem with language.

Brief notes on this parallel session from E-science all hands meeting on Tuesday morning. First talk in this session discussed the CARMEN project which aims to provide repositories and tools for neuroscience electrophyisology data. There was a short discussion on the challenges of persuading scientists to put the data in. The speaker’s (Paul Watson) view was that this would probably need to be driven by funders and journals.

Well when it’s not open obviously. There are many ways to provide all the information imagineable while still keeping things hidden. Or at least difficult to figure out or to find. The slogan ‘No insider information’ is useful because it provides a good benchmark to work towards. It is perhaps an ideal to attain rather than a practical target but thinking about what we know but is not clear from the blog notebook has a number of useful results.

I don’t really want to add anything more to what has been said in many places (and has been rounded up well by Bora Zivkovic on Blog Around the Clock, see also Peter Suber for the definitive critique, also updates here and here). However there is a public relations issue here for the open science movement in general that I think hasn’t come up yet.

I wanted to followup on the post I wrote a few days ago where I quoted a post from Black Knight on the concept of making methodology open. The point I wanted to make was the scientists in general might be even more protective of their methodology than they are of their data. However I realised afterwards that I may have given the impression that I thought BK was being less open than he ‘should’, which was not my intention.

Continuing the discussion set off by Black Knight and continued here and by Peter Murray-Rust I was interested in the following comment in Black Knight’s followup post (my emphasis and I have quoted slightly out of context to make my point). A lot of the debate has been about posting results and the risk of someone stealing them or otherwise using them. But in bioscience the competitive advantage that a laboratory has can lie in the methods.

Die britische Tageszeitung Guardian hat die Initiative „Free our data“ ins Leben gerufen. Die Kampagne setzt sich dafür ein, dass Daten von britischen Regierungsbehörden in Zukunft besser verfügbar sind. Gegenwärtig haben die Regierungsorganisationen ein Quasi-Monopol inne und lassen sich dieses teuer bezahlen.