It’s late and so I’ll keep this short. I’ll write more detailed accounts of Scifoo soon, but here are some highlights so far.
My day today started off with a contentious talk about open science. It quickly veered off into a complaint session about how the slow publication process in biology and the fear of not being credited and of being scooped are hindering open science (putting prepublication info and data online). But the physicists in the room quickly got annoyed by the complaining (not exactly new complaints either) and so the discussion got back on track to focus on current efforts to put more data and discussion of prepublication research online (such as Jean-Claude Bradley’s open notebook efforts). The session set the stage for several other related ones later in the day. It also spawned one taking place tomorrow about the culture of fear among young scientists: fear of doing open science, at the risk of jeopardizing career prospects. I’ll definitely be at that one. For another perspective on this session, check out Anna’s post on it.
I also attended sessions about the social implications of human genome sequencing/personalized genomics, building ecocities from scratch in China and a fun one about science comics for kids. More on those later.
Corie,
It was a bit surprising just how heated things got at times, even more so in other sessions. People obviously have a lot of personal investment in the system or are frustrated with the system.
I do wish that we could have spent more time on new tools that are currently being used to do Open Science instead of generalized fear about abstractions.
I agree with Jean-Claude. The significant differences between various scientific domains were very evident as well
I disagree. If you don’t address the concerns of most scientists you will never be able to create the proper tools. I do admit that this may be more of a problem in certain fields.
Alexander Palazzo hit the nail on the head. Also I have another suggestion, Why not call the movement open data instead. So have the same model as now. But the day any part of the project becomes public via an old fashioned publication. All data associated with it becomes public as well . By all I mean everything from gels to microarray results to the failed experiments along the way. That should ease people into being more open.
But I seriouly dont think things will change till the “myspace generation” takes to doing bench science.
There was a lot of discussion about terminology. I think there’s some confusion about what we mean when we say ‘open science.’ I think open data should be part of open science, but open science means a lot more than just releasing all data upon publication. It should also include sharing data and ideas before peer-reviewed publication. This is obviously the most controversial bit, so it was something that was talked about a lot.
There certainly has been a lot of confusion about definitions. For the purposes of what we are trying to accomplish by publishing all results in real-time, I’ve tried to be consistent in using the term Open Notebook Science – it is a concept that most bench chemists at least can understand – make the lab notebook you keep for all your work public in real time.
Anything between that and a traditional publication would fall under the general term “Open Science”. Given the inconsistent use of terms like Open Science and Open Data, we certainly can’t assume that people understand what we mean witout some elaboration.