Timing your decisions
daniel.mietchen@uni-jena.de
for www.eurodoc.net
34th FEBS Congress, Praha, July 5, 2009

Cameron Neylon http://www.flickr.com/photos/24801682@N08/3662760870/
CC-BY

Eurodoc overview
The European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers
Aim : Increase Europe's attractiveness for Early Stage Researchers
Federation of national organisations:
32 Members
Think tank on doctoral Mobility
research in Europe
PhD supervision
and training
Career
Gender
Surveys development
equality
(after Lara Passante, EC)
Partner of EC, EUA and others
in Bologna and Lisbon processes

http://twitter.com/CameronNeylon/status/2325135458
Cameron Neylon

Björn Brembs

http://twitter.com/lorddrayson/statuses/2346918193
Cameron Neylon

Björn Brembs

Hobbies
Society
Family
Planet
Your life
Research Knowledge
© Tiehuis et al., Diabetologia 51:1321–1326, 2008

Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon

http://twitter.com/larsjuhljensen/statuses/2315036730
Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon

How do you
maximise
efficiency in
generating
impact for your
research?
Cameron Neylon
16

Cameron Neylon

In the last five
years...?
Cameron Neylon
18
http://fickr.com/photos/stewart/461099066/ CC-BY

What is...
Cameron Neylon
http://www.fickr.com/photos/schnurrbart/43568532/ CC-BY-SA ...?

Too much to
read, and
neither
searchable nor
hyperlinked...
Cameron Neylon
http://www.fickr.com/photos/orinrobertjohn/2188277801 CC-BY

www.scopus.com
www.pubmed.gov
http://ukpmc.ac.uk
isiknowledge.com
scholar.google.com Duncan Hull

...in the past 24
hours?
Cameron Neylon

What would science look like
if it were invented today?
after
Duncan Hull http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/3389581452/ CC-BY

Björn Brembs, Freie Universität
Berlin
http://brembs.net
http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii

• Isolation
– each discipline has its own data silo
• Impersonal and unsociable
– “who the hell are you”?
– Where are “my” papers? (authored by me, or of interest
to me)
– What are my friends and colleagues reading?
– What are the experts reading? What is popular this week
/ month / year ?
• “Cold”: Identity of publications and authors is inadequate
• Obsolete models of publication, not everything fits publication-sized holes
– Micro-attribution
– Mega-attribution
– Digital contributions (databases, software, wikis/blogs?)
Duncan Hull

Yesterday T oday
Paper Bits and bytes
Brick and mortar libraries Cyberspace
Institute library address Uniform resource identifiers (URIs)
High cost of printing and distribution Publishing costs fallen by orders of
magnitude
Only comprehensible to a few humans Read and indexed by machines (e.g.,
Googlebot)
Restricted access to a few subscribers Increasingly public
Björn Brembs

Björn Brembs

Björn Brembs

• Won‘t go away
• Should always be a last resort
• They are much too valuable to be satisfied
with the current pitiful state of affairs
• Let‘s make them as good as we possibly can!
Björn Brembs

Your article:
• Received X citations (de-duped from Google
Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science)
• It was viewed X times, placing it in the top Y%
of all articles in this journal/community
• It received X Comments
• It was bookmarked X times in Social
Bookmarking sites
• Experts in your community rated it as X, Y, Z
• It was discussed on X ‘respected’ blogs
• It appeared in X, Y, Z International News
media
Björn Brembs Peter Binfield

Björn Brembs

refworks.com
zotero.org
hubmed.org mendeley.com
2collab.com
connotea.org citeulike.org
Re-couple metadata that has be de-coupled from data
www.mekentosj.com
Björn Brembs “iTunes for PDF files”

How would knowledge sharing look like if it were invented today?
• No more publishers – libraries archive everything according to
a world-wide standard
• Single semantic, decentralized database of data in context
• Personalized filtering
• Peer-review after posting, supervised by an independent body
• Link typology for text/text, data/data and text/data links
(formerly „citations“)
• Semantic Text/Datamining
• All the metrics you (don‘t) want (but need)
• Tagging, bookmarking, etc.
• Unique contributor IDs with attribution/reputation system
(teaching, reviewing, curating, blogging, etc.)
• Technically feasible today (almost)
Björn Brembs
http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii

Not just papers, but
ideas, web pages, data,
materials, software
Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon
http://tinyurl.com/dku869

Cameron Neylon

Cameron Neylon

...making the right
connections
Cameron Neylon
http://www.fickr.com/photos/mararie/3313582639/ CC-BY-SA

Make your
work available
40
Cameron Neylon

Let others build
on it...
41
Cameron Neylon

...to increase
your impact
42
Cameron Neylon

http://twitter.com/EvoMRI/statuses/2316110674
Cameron Neylon

OK, but what
about timing all
these
decisions?
44

If you share as
things arise,
timing is not
the issue.
45

The issue is
whether or not to
do science in the
open, especially if
you are a young
researcher. 46