Scientific findings in a digital world: What is the genuine article? forum: topic
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post match chats?
David Papapostolou
Monday, 27 July 2009 09:06 UTC
Hello,
i was wondering what people thought of John W’s talk last wednesday.
Can people send me any pointers to online chats?
Thanks!
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If you’d like to follow the friend feed discussion, the URL is: http://friendfeed.com/british-library
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The main thread FF David is this one.
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Oh, and here’s what was posted on Twitter.
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Thanks Karen and Graham, i had found the FF thread in the meantime actually.
Having attended the talk, i was wondering if anyone who had too (or not actually) had bloggeded some sort of analysis, generated comments and so forth.
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David. The only blog post that I can find is this one.
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I think that everyone was probably waiting for someone else to start a discussion!!
There is some discussion about the papers of the future in Martin Fenner’s blog.
It was quite enlightening for me to hear how far people have got in exploring these ideas.
One thing that occured to me in thinking about firstly the comment that we already have so much to read, and secondly the discussion about Plos one and removing from reviewers the role of deciding on impact, was that maybe a system could work that was an extension of plos one and faculty of 1000.
Must dash and get some lunch, would love to hear what you thought though David…
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thanks Graham for the link, that’s an interesting view point: an infromation sciences person who says libriarians have been trying to find solutions to this same semantic (naming/cataloguing in libray talks) problem for some time without finding a working solution.
My first impression is a rather lasting one actually, surprisingly it is only peripherial to the theme of scholarly publishing. What stroke me the most was John’s Wilbanks fascination for the medium, namely the web, as an ever-changing entity and in a mostly unpredictible manner. His analysis of the forces that will drive the web in one direction or another were particularly interesting. I wouldn’t say insightfull, rather tongue-in-cheekily, because as he aknowledged himself, he might be proven completly wrong in a few years. But captivating it certainly was.
I enjoyed going through the FF thread, as a reminder of the different points that came up in the discussion. After all John still beleive in the classic paper format and the peer-review process. I don’t think he would like the scientific article to be so much different in the future. His point was more to find ways to make interoperability work and promote open access in order to facilitate the circulation of knowledge, ideas and tools.
Of course there were talks on how little of the process of making research actually makes it into the paper, but i guess this only reflects the current pressure towards publishing article as the only way to account to funders. Maybe a way to open-up the content of papers to datasets, method-themed blogs and wikis and so on, would be to get funders to aknowledge these as research output on par with articles? Also, reviewing articles would have to be fully aknowledged as part of the job and (to use the image of the resistance of the wires) some funds and/or reward mechanism associated with it. The reason for that is that the process of reviewing an “extended article” will be more time consuming than it is now with the current format.
That’s my 2p for now, hope it makes some kind of sense.
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@David Of course there were talks on how little of the process of making research actually makes it into the paper, but i guess this only reflects the current pressure towards publishing article as the only way to account to funders.
Which in a way is ironic, funders want the most value for money and the current way we publish does not necessarily deliver this. There is much good work that never gets into the public domain because there just isn’t enough of it to make a paper or the data was negative and therefore not regarded as impactful…so I completely agree with your point about opening science up to other mediums and somehow assigning at least some credit to them. I think it will be important to resolve this, perhaps through author ids, if we are ever to move beyond only having conventional papers.
It will also be important to talk about how to review things like data-sets that are published on the web. Even if there are also written about in a paper so that the author gets cited there are no conventions for how these should be reviewed. At the moment I suspect they would only be evaluated for interest rather than quality as assessing the quality is so difficult.
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Maybe we could have a faculty of 1000 equivalent for blogs, wikis etc…
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Me thinks it would be more than appropriate to hear directly from John himself if he can spare a mo to drop by – bear with me.
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