Have just returned from the amazing and energetic science online 2011 conference, where I will now, like the rest of the attendees, turn to catching up on sleep, following new online acquaintances, struggling not to append #scio11 to everything I write, and composing that nearly obligatory post-event blog entry we all use like a glass of water after a party; with the hope in may help me metabolize the experience.
Never mind that I don’t actually blog. I just have this lab notebook, normally filled with equations, graphs and code. But it is recordings of my research experience, even if it is written only for me most of the time, so let’s just call this part of research and forgive the conversational tone. Meanwhile I will use the excuse to write more at length for myself the notes I wish to remember than would be seemly in writing in a blog with an audience. In the spirit of this resembling my daily notebook and also in actually finishing this post, here are my notes and thoughts on Saturday’s amazing blur. 1
Saturday
I began the day in Kay’s (@kaythaney) Digital Toolbox session, room C, where I would return for each of my sessions that day. It was one of the live-streamed rooms, so all the following sessions should have archived recordings. The sessions that followed sequentially in this room fit together like a perfectly flowing conversation, as if each one responding to the former and anticipating the next. Just further evidence that Bora ([@Boraz](https://twitter.com/#!/boraz)) and Anton ([@mistersugar](https://twitter.com/#!/mistersugar)) must come from magic lamps.
Next up brought one of my existing luminaries, Steve Koch),2, with Kiyomi Deards and Molly Keener to the panel on data discover-ability and archiving in Open Notebook Science. The session erupted in lively debate on the relative merits of commercial hosting solutions which may offer great discoverability and ease of use until they suddenly go the way of Del.icio.us, or institutional repositories, which are long lived but often unintegrated even amongst themselves. The good-spirited solutions all pointed to doing both and trying to make each better.
Not that we wouldn’t also question that optimism too, for the next session asked us: “What’s keeping us from open science?” Covering many things, at the heart of this session was the crux of lacking incentives. The promise of altmetrics loomed large, but I wondered if we needed to do focus more on making impact with open science than merely measuring it. For instance, we can surely try to measure the impact of open notebooks and science tweets, but tools for better discovery, standardization, or more semantic open content may go much father to having unmistakable impact.
The schedule indicates 3 that lunch happened next. though he whirling discussions left me with lots of ideas and names than memories of food or thoughts to my own upcoming panel. But no matter, I would be sitting with the heroes Jean-Claude Bradley (@jcbradley) and Anthony Williams (@ChemConnector), so why worry?
Our session on Open Notebook Science quickly gave us reason to worry when the projector which had done fine thus far suddenly refused to work. Nevermind, we all work with technology too frequently to be unfamiliar with its failure - we would do without. If you were there and you’re wondering what you missed, here are my slides. See Jean-Claude’s post for more on our session.
I described the tools I use to make my notebook more automated and complete and discussed my vision of a social lab notebook. In face of the observation that many open database efforts face the tragedy of commons effect (many researchers may use the resources but few contribute) I discussed some of the many immediate benefits the practice has had for me. I must say what an immense treat it is to be able to finish a session and see the immediate feedback and reactions it has generated through the online streams.
The video recording of our session has now been posted:
Open Notebook Science: Pushing Data from Bench to Web Service from Smartley-Dunn on Vimeo.
See the recordings of the other sessions as well.
Having broached the idea of altmetrics on several occasions already, our next session dove into the details of how we might construct these, what they might measure, and how they would be received. Or as it was more concisely and provocatively phrased by Paul Groth ([@pgroth](https://twitter.com/#!/pgroth)):
Would you list the number of twitter followers you have on your CV?
The last session dived further into tackling and improving the most common metric: citations. From citations that map to specific parts of articles to ones measuring the sentiment (supports/refutes) or even anticipating the social-cultural context of citations, the potential here is amazing. Jason Hoyt’s ([@jasonHoyt](https://twitter.com/#!/jasonhoyt)) 140 characters may have captured this session best:
if I do my job right, no one will care about publishing in Nature, Science or Cell…
Indicating that better article discovery and citation tracking through tools such as Mendeley would make the impact factor obsolete.
The evening banquet featured many highlights, including seeing one of my fellow graduate students in the video competition, the very moving story of Meg Lowman’s ([@canopymeg](https://twitter.com/#!/canopymeg)) work researching and inspiring rain-forest conservation, laughing tears at Brian Marlow’s ([@sciencecomedian](https://twitter.com/#!/sciencecomedian)) humorist routine, and talks deep into the night about innovated ideas in open education with JC and then the future of publishing with Jason, Mark and Tony ([@jasonPriem](https://twitter.com/#!/jasonpriem), [@science3point0](https://twitter.com/#!/science3point0), and [@ChemConnector](https://twitter.com/#!/ChemConnector)).
Many other great discussions throughout the day on and off line that I cannot begin to capture here. But after all, they are just beginning.
Note this was written up on Jan 17 upon returning to reality with enough time to write, but published under the event date for notebook consistency. Touched up for the Jekyll notebook 2013-07-09, see history in sidebar.↩
pronounced cook, I learned, and all of a sudden understood the chef’s hat symbol for their lab that has puzzled me for a year!↩
Also, the schedule lists the full topics and presenters for these sessions, for which reason I should work in a link to it somewhere.↩