ScholCommsProd

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a UXer within an agile environment. I thought it was a great talk. When at Mendeley we always faced the problem of trying to square the challenge to fitting an inherently creative process into the systems that emerged while we attempted to adopt agile processes, in my time there we learnt a lot, we had some success and some areas where we obviously needed to learn more, so I was delighted to hear a very thoughtful presentation from the perspective of someone who it seems has worked with quite a few teams implementing agile in a variety of flavours.

This is a report on todays consultation on open data that was help by the EC. The notes are long, so I have put my conclusions and general comments at the start. General comments There was not much disagreement throughout the day. There were repeated calls for the need to incentivise researchers to engage in data sharing, but not too many concrete proposals on how to do this. It does seem from my perspective that libraries could do an amazing job here, but that will depend on to which extent these libraries have deep technical expertise.

The following is the written representation that I made to the EC hearing on Open Data on behalf of Co-Action publishers, Copernicus Publications, eLife, F1000 Research, FigShare, Frontiers, Open Books Publishers, PeerJ, the Public Library of Science, Ubiquity Press and Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (QScience). I had a five minute slot to present, and the key recommendations at the end of this written response formed the basis of that presentation. I added one slide at the end with a personal view on some of the challenges of getting researchers to share data.

I took a look at the T&F survey with interest. I’m also very aware of the concerns and confusions that exist around licensing. I’m also aware of the “one size doesn’t fit all” argument. I’ll address the T&F survey first, and then I’ll briefly discuss CC-BY pros and cons, purely from the point of view of my own understanding of these issues - I might be very wrong on this.

On Monday the 14th of January we met at the PLOS offices in Cambridge to hear a talk from Euan Birney on lessons learned from publishing data rich publications though the encode project. This was the first time that Euan was far less worried about the print, and far more worried about how well the online version was going to work. Dimensions of the project 5 TeraBases 1715 times the size of the Human Genome 3k experiments 410 authors on the main paper 6 high profile papers ~35 companion papers The output should not be thought of as papers, but as the raw data.

Update, audio of the meeting is now available on figshare Last Thursday I attended the SciCommForum debate “Open access: going for gold?” held at Imperial College. Below are my notes from the event. The notes are fairly raw, and not comprehensive. The debate is going to be looking at open access in the context of the RCUK policy, it is being hosted by Richard Van Noorden (RVN), Mark Thorley (MT) from RCUK, and Stephen Curry (SC).

I’ve been concerned for a few years about the flow of data that we are producing, and how to handle the angst of not being able to keep up with everything, ever. I think it started when I became a very heavy user of google reader back in 2006 or so. There is little doubt that the web is moving more in this direction, Anil Dash recently called for people to stop creating web pages, and to start creating only streams.

Last week an interesting discussion on the cost of copy editing popped up over on Stephen Curry’s blog. In addition the comment thread at the recent Science editorial seems to make this post somewhat timely. I used to manage the copy editing of a good portion of physical science related content from Springer from 2002 – 2005. I’m also currently in the process of setting up a new online-only journal.

The upcoming altmetrics meeting, and a submitted abstract by Kelli Barr prompted me to note down some of my own thoughts on peer review and altmetrics. I would love to make it over to the meeting, but with just a few days now before my first child is born, it ain’t gonna happen. I’ve not read Kelly’s paper, but after reading the abstract my take home message from it would be something along the lines of “don’t replace peer review with altmetrics because you will just replace one bias with another, and at least with peer review the bias is contained within the academic community”

Last year I was asked to contribute to a special issue on the evolution of peer review. I got quite excited about doing this, but then realised that I really didn’t have the time to write a paper. I’m not a practicing academic, I build products, and while at Mendeley I really had far too much on my plate to find the time to write up a paper. However the topic does interest me, and I am a strong believer that web scale technologies can help with the scientific communication process though a large number of avenues.