Takuya Homma's Library tagged Science2.0 →  View Popular, Search in Google

In January 2009, a mathematician at Cambridge University named Tim Gowers decided to use his blog to run an unusual social experiment. He picked out a difficult mathematical problem and tried to solve it completely in the open, using his blog to post ideas and partial progress. He issued an open invitation for others to contribute their own ideas, hoping that many minds would be more powerful than one. He dubbed the experiment the Polymath Project.

Despite the value of open data, most labs make no systematic effort to share data with other scientists. As one biologist told me, he had been "sitting on [the] genome" for an entire species of life for more than a year. A whole species of life! Just imagine the vital discoveries that other scientists could have made if that genome had been uploaded to an online database.

Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around the world duplicating research that has already been carried out. FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures.

Last week, Science Exchange in Palo Alto, Calif., launched a Web site allowing scientists to outsource their research to "providers"--other researchers and institutions that have the facilities and equipment to meet requesting scientists' needs. Nature asked the company's co-founder, researcher-turned-entrepreneur Elizabeth Iorns, how the website works, and what an online marketplace for experiments could mean for the future of research.

“ The CSA is a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process. These projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of citizen scientists who are our collaborators ”

This dataset lists the ~ 58k tweets that mentioned a scientific article (broadly speaking anything with a DOI, PMID or arxiv ID) between the 1st and 31st of July 2011.

Recall isn't 100%: my best estimate is that it's missing another ~ 6k tweets where the article couldn't be identified, the link was malformed or the journal involved is new or gets very low traffic.

We’re thrilled to unveil the Catalyst Prize – a programme designed to unleash the most promising new ideas for software in science. This provides grants up to £15,000 (around $24,000) each to fund exciting innovations, and to take them from concept to prototype. They also come with the opportunity to work with the Digital Science team to help refine, develop and promote the innovation. In this way we hope to lower barriers and foster greater creativity in information-technology solutions for science.

Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.

For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.

• Where data or collections of data are published it is critical that they be published with a clear and explicit statement of the wishes and expectations of the publishers with respect to re-use and re-purposing of individual data elements, the whole data collection, and subsets of the collection. This statement should be precise, irrevocable, and based on an appropriate and recognized legal statement in the form of a waiver or license.

    

  When publishing data make an explicit and robust statement of your wishes.

• Many widely recognized licenses are not intended for, and are not appropriate for, data or collections of data. A variety of waivers and licenses that are designed for and appropriate for the treatment of data are described here. Creative Commons licenses (apart from CCZero), GFDL, GPL, BSD, etc are NOT appropriate for data and their use is STRONGLY discouraged.

    

  Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.

•  The use of licenses which limit commercial re-use or limit the production of derivative works by excluding use for particular purposes or by specific persons or organizations is STRONGLY discouraged. These licenses make it impossible to effectively integrate and re-purpose datasets and prevent commercial activities that could be used to support data preservation.

    

  If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Knowledge/Data Definition – in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.

A user called Greg Maxwell just uploaded a torrent with 18,592 scientific publications to the Pirate Bay, in what appears to be a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. All the documents of the 32-gigabyte torrent were taken from JSTOR, the academic database that’s at the center of the case against Swartz.

The torrent consists of documents from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the copyright to which has long since expired. However, the only way to access these documents until now has been via JSTOR, as Maxwell explains in a long and eloquent text on the Pirate Bay, with individual articles costing as much as $19. “Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he writes.

In 2008, Mr. Swartz released a “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,” calling for activists to “fight back” against the sequestering of scholarly papers and information behind pay walls.

Within 24 hours, the new website was receiving 70,000 classifications per hour.   Within a year, the Galazy Zoo had received more than 50 million classifications from over 150, 000 people. This spectacular example of crowdsourced science (“citizen science”) fascinates me.  I think it represents marketing at its best—involving the customers in very the creation of the product.  So I called up Dr. Chris Lintott to ask him more about it.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The three organisations aim to establish a new journal that will attract and define the very best research publications from across these fields. All research published in the journal will make highly significant contributions that will extend the boundaries of scientific knowledge.

The Zooniverse was born from the conviction that the sheer enthusiasm of our original Galaxy Zoo volunteers could make a significant difference in other fields too. A few years and many projects on, I’m more convinced than ever that that’s true, and it’s time to step up a gear.

Washington—The call to action was all over the Association for Psychological Science’s annual meeting here this past weekend. “Attention APS Members. Take Charge of Your Science,” fliers shout. Promotional ads in the conference programs urge the society’s 25,000 members to join the APS Wikipedia Initiative and “make sure Wikipedia—the world’s No. 1 online encyclopedia—represents psychology fully and accurately.” And the Wikimedia Foundation, which backs the encyclopedia, was holding editing demonstrations in the middle of the conference exhibit hall.

But getting academics to fix it is a tall order, Ms. Banaji admitted. “I know my colleagues won’t really want to write Wikipedia articles. It just won’t be seen as important, because it isn’t going on their CV,” she said.

Berners-Lee said at the Profiting from the New Web conference in London on Monday that the internet lacks an all-encompassing social network that enables such experts to collaborate on projects.

He called it the Polymath Project and it rapidly took on a life of its own. Within days, readers, including high-ranking academics, had chipped in vital pieces of information or new ideas. In just a few weeks, the number of contributors had reached more than 40 and a result was on the horizon. Since then, the joint effort has led to several papers published in journals under the collective pseudonym DHJ Polymath. It was an astonishing and unexpected result.

"If you set out to solve a problem, there's no guarantee you will succeed," says Gowers. "But different people have different aptitudes and they know different tricks… it turned out their combined efforts can be much quicker."

London's Royal Society has launched a study, "Science as a public enterprise," which will examine "how scientific information should be managed to support innovative and productive research that reflects public values."

It is therefore important that science is not, and is not seen to be, a private enterprise, conducted behind the closed doors of laboratories, but a public enterprise to understand better the world we live in and our place in it. Effective dialogue about the priorities and insights of science and its relation to public values is vital. Scientists can no longer assume an unquestioning public trust.