Science in the Open

Science in the open What can be done? What should be done?

Science in the open What can be done? What should be d? a done? it le m ig ht he re nd w A

About me.

I live in Bath http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/andypowe11/3915450391

I work at RAL

I work for STFC...

But The opinions expressed in this talk are the personal views of the speaker given as a private citizen and should not unders any circumstances be taken of as indicative of STFC, RCUK, or government policy or of any discussions within these organizations of future policy....

I get up in the morning http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/andypowe11/3251538402

...and catch a train http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mattbuck007/3710451826

...and a bus

...to get to work

I work on... Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons Succinate_Dehydrogenase_1YQ3_and_Membrane.png MGMT BDNA_1T38.png

...and get to do cool stuff

Mixture of small-lab work...

...and big facility experiments

Lots of reading... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/loty/326761635

...meetings... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/amagill/38961674

...too much travel... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/22819720@N02/2306780847

Why do they pay?

Why do they pay? http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mararie/3313582639/ CC-BY-SA

Why do they pay? w e http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mararie/3313582639/ CC-BY-SA

Cures... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/59334544@N00/2322167178

Prestige... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/natematias/310642831 CC-BY-SA

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/penmachine/2109311458/ ...excitement

Why do I do it?

Mortgage... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/2143212474 CC-BY

...curiosity... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/emiliodelprado/225161313

Fun! http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/wwworks/2908834853

This is a privilege.

Not a right.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jamescridland/3947254236

But how? http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/valeriebb/2248744703

But sometimes...

...formal publication http://ﬂickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2756494307/

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/siberianluck/3450937497 ...is overkill...

An example

9:00 am, 4 September 2008

http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp207 Flickr tag: UC207

7:36 pm, 4 September 2008

Publishing is easy... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/cybershotking/329184504/

...data, documents, media...

Broadcasting is easy...

...sharing is harder http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/missrogue/107787363

Interoperability is the key... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sﬂlaw/222795669

Technical interoperability... ...formats, vocabularies http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jeffsand/3871415191

Legal interoperability... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/spunter/3239363956

Technical Legal interop. interop. Process interoperability

Systems need to work with existing process

...and people

A short story...

MyTea project: A fully semantic laboratory record for chemistry http://mytea.org.uk/

But not molecular biology

General MyTea Speciﬁc Unstructured Structured

General ? MyTea Speciﬁc Unstructured Structured

General Blogs ? MyTea Speciﬁc Unstructured Structured

A recipe for chaos? http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/benuski/3452291541

Yes to start with...

But then something interesting happened...

Templates Metadata

Self assembling ontology? Sequence ontology: SO:0000696 “oligo” SO:0000155 “plasmid” ...but... SO:0000006 “PCR product” or SO:0000412 “rest. fragment”?

Capture first... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/furtwangl/3851841424

Dionaea muscipula Musca domestica chomped on ...then add structure

Map our process onto agreed vocabularies

...when we tell the story http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tnarik/366393127

Machines do structure http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/2463225297

Machines need structure http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/2463225297

....humans tell stories

Tools that capture the pieces of the research record as we create them

Tools that capture structure as we choose the pieces for our narrative

Tools that exploit structure that is already in the process

What can we do?

Technically able to share http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/yourdon/3088582622

...the whole record http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AGBell_Notebook.jpg

...but will we want to share? http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2162663143

The mainstream response looks like

http://flickr.com/photos/zanotti/314391903/

...or...

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tammra/283690669/

...leading to a lot of...

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tranchis/3708549622

How do we persuade? http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mattymatt/3017263513

Actually I’m not worried...

Submissions to Genbank 100,000,000,000 75,000,000,000 50,000,000,000 25,000,000,000 0 1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006

Average Capacity of Human Scientist 5.00 3.75 2.50 1.25 0 1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006

The human scientist (that’s me) Does. Not. Scale.

The web scales

Government doesn’t scale

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/amagill/38961674 ...research groups don’t scale

The web scales

Scientists will need to be web-native just to survive

Web native means connected Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Bettencourt L, Chute R, et al. (2009) Clickstream Data Yields High- Resolution Maps of Science. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803

which means sharing... http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/doubledareya/2443303399

“I propose the seeming paradox that in science, private property is established by having its substance freely given to others who might want to make use of it.” Merton (1988) ISIS 79:606

Not just papers

And if the objects are not open and available?

Open content builds the network

The network is the only way we will keep up

If we build tools that help scientists build networks...

… then (more) open research will follow http://ﬂickr.com/photos/good-karma/710068054/

Cameron.Neylon@stfc.ac.uk http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen http://slideshare.net/cameronneylon Twitter: @cameronneylon Friendfeed: cameronneylon Thanks to: Text Sciencetwists, Friendfeeders, and the wider online community for ideas, criticism, and conversations. Deepak Singh, Larry Lessig, Andy Powell, and John Wilbanks for presentation inspiration. Flickr and Wikimedia Commons for images

http://eurodoc2010.doktorat.at	47
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https://c1.livetext.com	1
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Science in the Open

by Cameron Neylon on Jan 08, 2010

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