creative commons – Sciblogs https://sciblogs.co.nz Sciblogs Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:14:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.1 https://sciblogs.co.nz/app/uploads/2019/04/cropped-SciBlogsFBProfile-32x32.jpg creative commons – Sciblogs https://sciblogs.co.nz 32 32 Open Access Week 2014 https://sciblogs.co.nz/building-blogs-of-science/2013/10/25/open-access-week-2014/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:14:45 +0000 http://buildingblogsofscience.wordpress.com/?p=991 ]]> What do brain machine interfaces and Open Science have in common?

They are two examples of concepts that I never thought I would get to see materialised in my lifetime. I was wrong.

oa_blue_orange02large

Kiwi Open Access Logo by the University of Auckland, Libraries and Learning Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

I had heard of the idea of Open Access as Public Library of Science was about to launch (or was in its early infancy) . It was about that time that I moved to New Zealand and was not able to go to conferences as frequently as I did in the USA, and couldn’t afford having an internet connection at home. Email communication (especially when limited to work hours) does not promote the same kind of chitter-chatter you might have as you wait in cue for your coffee – and so my work moved along, somewhat oblivious to what was going to become a big focus for me later on: Open Science.

About 6 years ofter moving to New Zealand things changed. Over a coffee with Nat Torkington, I became aware of some examples of people working in science embracing a  more open attitude. This conversation had a big impact on me.  Someone whom I never met before described me a whole different way of doing science. This resonated (strongly) because what he described were the ideals I had at the start of my journey; ideals that were slowly eroded by the demands of the system around me.  By 2009 I had found a strong group of people internationally that were working to make this happen, and who inspired me to try to do something locally.  And the rest is history.

What resonated with me about “Open Science” is the notion that knowledge is not ours to keep – that it belongs in the public domain where it can be a driver for change. I went to a free of fees University and we fought hard to keep it that way. Knowledge was a right and sharing knowledge was our duty. I moved along my career in parallel with shrinking funding pots and a trend towards academic commodification.  The publish or perish mentality, the fears of being back-stabbed if one shares to early or too often, the idea of the research article placed in the “well-branded” journal, and the “paper” as a measure of one’s worth as a scientist all conspire to detract us from exploring open collaborative spaces.  The world I walked into around 2009 was seeking to do away with all this nonsense. I have tried to listen and learn as much as I can, sometimes I even dared to put in my 2 cents or ask questions.

How to make it happen?

cc-by Mariano Kamp on Flickr

The biggest hurdle I have found is that I don’t do my work in isolation. As much as I might want to embrace Open Science, when the work is collaborative I am not the one that makes the final call. In a country as small as New Zealand it is difficult to find the critical mass at the intersection of my research interests (and knowledge) and the desire to do work in the open space. If you want to collaborate with the best, you may not be able to be picky on the shared ethos. This is particularly true for those struggling with building a career and getting a permanent position, the advice of those at the hiring table will always sound louder.

The reward system seems at times to be stuck in a place where incentives are (at all levels) stacked against Open Science; “rewards” are distributed at the “researcher” level. Open Research is about a solution to a problem, not to someone’s career advancement (although that should come as a side-effect).  It is not surprising then how little value is placed in whether one’s science can be replicated or re-used. Once the paper is out and the bean drops in the jar, our work is done. I doubt that even staffing committees or those evaluating us will even care about pulling those research outputs and reading them to assess their value – if they did we would not need to have things like Impact Factors, h-index and the rest.  And here is the irony – we struggle to brand our papers to satisfy a rewards system that will never look beyond its title. At the same time those who care about the content and want to reuse it are limited by whichever restrictions we chose to put at the time of publishing.

So what do we do?

I think we need to be sensitive to the struggle of those that might want to embrace open science, but are trying to negotiate the assessment requirements of their careers. Perhaps getting more people who embrace these principles at staffing and research University Committees might at least provide the opportunity to ask the right questions about “value” and at the right time. If we can get more open minded stances at the hiring level, this will go far in changing people’s attitudes at the bench.

I, for one, find myself in a relatively good position. My continuation was approved a few weeks ago, so I won’t need to face the staffing committee except for promotion.  A change in title might be nice – but it is not a deal-breaker, like tenure. I have tried to open my workflow in the past, and learned enough from the experience, and will keep trying until I get it right. I am slowly seeing the shift in my colleagues’ attitudes – less rolling of eyes, a bit more curiosity.  For now, let’s call that progress.

I came to meet in person many of those who inspired me through the online discussions since 2009, and they have always provided useful advice, but more importantly support.  Turning my workflow to “Open” has been as hard as I anticipated.  I have failed more than I have succeeded but always learned something from the experience. And one question that keeps me going is:

What did the public give you the money for?

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[Open] Science Sunday – 19-5-13 https://sciblogs.co.nz/building-blogs-of-science/2013/05/19/open-science-sunday-19-5-13/ Sat, 18 May 2013 21:46:39 +0000 http://buildingblogsofscience.wordpress.com/?p=919 ]]> 2012 was a really interesting year for Open Research.

The year started with a boycott to Elsevier (The Cost of Knowledge) , soon followed  in May by a petition at We The People in the US,  asking the US government to “Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.”. By June we had The Royal Society publishing  a paper on “science as an open enterprise” [pdf]  saying:

The opportunities of intelligently open research data are exemplified in a number of areas of science.With these experiences as a guide, this report argues that it is timely to accelerate and coordinate change, but in ways that are adapted to the diversity of the scientific enterprise and the interests of: scientists, their institutions, those that fund, publish and use their work and the public.

The Finch report had a large share of media coverage [pdf]   –

Our key conclusion, therefore, is that a clear policy direction should be set to support the publication of research results in open access or hybrid journals funded by APCs. A clear policy direction of that kind from Government, the Funding Councils and the Research Councils would have a major effect in stimulating, guiding and accelerating the shift to open access.

By July the UK government announced the support for the Open Access recommendations from the Finch Report to ensure:

Walk-in rights for the general public, so they can have free access to global research publications owned by members of the UK Publishers’ Association, via public libraries. [and] Extending the licensing of access enjoyed by universities to high technology businesses for a modest charge.

The Research Councils OK joined by publishing a policy on OA (recently updated) that required [pdf] :

Where the RCUK OA block  grant is used to pay Article Processing Charges for a paper, the paper must  be made Open Accesess immediately at  the time of on line publication, using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

Open Access Definition Cards and Buttons

CC-BY-NC-SA Jen Waller on Flickr

By the time that Open Access Week came around, there was plenty to discuss. The discussion of Open Access emphasised more strongly the re-use licences under which the work was published. The discussion also included some previous analysis showing that there are benefits from publishing in Open Access that affect economies:

adopting this model could lead to annual savings of around EUR 70 million in Denmark, EUR 133 in The Netherlands and EUR 480 million in the UK.

And in November, the New Zealand Open Source Awards recognised Open Science fro the first time too.

2013 promises not to fall behind

This year offers good opportunities to celebrate local and international advocates of Open Science.

The Obama administration not only responded to last year’s petition by issuing a memorandum geared towards making Federally funded research adopt open access policies, but is now also seeking “Outstanding Open Science Champions of Change” . Nominations for this close on May 14, 2013.  Simultaneously, The Public Library of Science, Google and the Wellcome Trust , together with a number of allies are sponsoring the “Accelerating Science Award Program” which seeks to recognise and reward individuals, groups or projects that have used Open Access scientific works in innovative manners. The deadline for this award is June 15.

Last year Peter Griffin  wrote:

The policy shift in the UK will open up access to the work of New Zealand scientists by default as New Zealanders are regularly co-authors on papers paid for by UK Research Councils funds. But hopefully it will also lead to some introspection about our own open access policies here.

There was some reflection at the NZAU Open Research Conference which led to the Tasman Declaration – (which I encourage you to sign) and those of us who were involved in it are hoping good things will come out of it. While that work continues, I will be revisiting the nominations of last years Open Science category for the NZ Open Source Awards to make my nominations for the two awards mentioned above.

I certainly look forward to this year – I will continue to work closely with Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand and with NZ AU Open Research to make things happen, and continue to put my 2 cents as an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE and PeerJ.

There is no question that the voice of Open Access is now loud and clear – and over the last year it has also become a voice that is not only being heard, but that it also generating the kinds of responses that will lead to real change.

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Open course: Science from Superheroes to Global Warming https://sciblogs.co.nz/misc-ience/2013/03/14/open-course-science-from-superheroes-to-global-warming/ Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:46:36 +0000 http://misc-ience.co.nz/?p=5639 Read more ›]]> It’s been a while, dear readers. And how I’ve missed you*.

I’ve bought a house, been terrifying myself learning to ride offroad motorcycles on ‘the monster’ (my new bike), got involved in some veeery interesting new projects, and there’s still that damn day job 😛 Not good excuses, mind, but at least reasons.

But!  I’ve found something just wonderful for you all to have a play with. This morning, while reading about some of the oh-so-geeky classes one can take at tertiary level, I came across this one: Physics 21: Science from Superheroes to Global Warming, from the University of California, Irvine.

science. mmmmmm.
science. mmmmmm.

It ticks a myriad of boxes. Not only is it about science, the scientific method, superheroes and more, (like ‘the scientific possibility of things such as the effects of a yellow sun on an alien humanoid or if a truly invisible jet is possible’) but – and this is the best bit – it’s available to ANYONE.

That’s right, boys and girls, it’s licensed under Creative Commons, and you can take it online.

A fuller description of the course:

Have you ever wondered if Superman could really fly? What was Spiderman’s spidey sense? How did Wonder Woman’s invisible jet work? What does it really mean for something to be a scientific “fact”? Explore how science works and what constitutes “good” science through case studies drawn from a wide spectrum of people’s experience, for example superheros, movies, and real world issues such as global warming. The case studies will provide the chance to act as science critics as the students develop a better appreciation for science and the scientific method.

Attribution

Michael Dennin, Professor of Physics, School of Physical Sciences, University of California, Irvine

I intend to begin it forthwith, to see what it’s like. I hope you’ll join me, and get everyone you know, no matter their age, to do so, too!

—–

It’s been going since 2010, although I’d not come across it before**, and the NY Times seems to like it, which is a good sign.

—–

*Well, those of you still reading, heh

** Not that that’s saying much

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Open Access – A Challenge https://sciblogs.co.nz/infectious-thoughts/2012/10/28/open-access-a-challenge/ Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:09:04 +0000 https://sciblogs.co.nz/infectious-thoughts/?p=892 This post originally appeared on the Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand website as part of Open Access Week.

A few days ago I was asked what my role is in science. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately*. So, who am I and what is my role? I am a publicly funded scientist with a passion for nasty microbes and things that glow in the dark. I am also a blogger and podcaster and have struck up a relationship with a great team of graphic artists to make a series of short YouTube animations about glowing creatures and science. Until recently I would have said my role in science was to do research, but with a side-line in communicating science in an effort to generate public interest and excitement.

The fact that communication is seen almost as an optional extra in a career in science is quite astonishing, I think. Why else in this digital age of multidisciplinary science would we write papers incomprehensible to almost all but those scientists in our own narrow field? Why else would we publish in journals only accessible to those institutions with budgets big enough to afford the subscription charges? In case you were thinking that it is only small, non-research or polytechnic institutions that are affected by this, last year for example, the University of California (UC) threatened to cancel their subscription to all Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals after NPG wanted to increase the price of UC’s licence by 400%. This is also a problem in New Zealand universities.  Both as a scientist and a blogger, I’ve often wanted to read a paper that wasn’t available through my institutional subscription. With time at a premium, I find that I don’t bother going through the hoops of trying to get hold of the paper by other means. Are my peers doing the same with my papers? If they are, presumably, this will affect how widely my research is cited.

It wasn’t until I started my own research group a few years ago, and had to take responsibility for deciding which journal to submit papers to, that I realised just how ridiculous the traditional model of science publishing is. In essence the tax payer funds my research, pays for me to publish it (in the form of colour page charges as a lot of my data is presented using colour figures) and then every institution, be it university or Crown Research Institute, in New Zealand has to pay subscription charges so that other scientists here can read what I’ve discovered. This strikes me as a terrible waste of resources – resources which could be used to fund more research, rather than provide obscene profits for giant publishing houses. This is why I support the Open Access model offered by the likes of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed Central (BMC). These platforms charge a fee to publish but then the material is freely available to all under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence where the authors retain copyright for their article.

But the Open Access ‘movement’ has the potential to do more than just improve my citations and allow more money to be spent on doing science. Opening up the fruits of scientific research to anyone with access to the internet changes everything.  It gives people access to the science they fund. The importance of this was brought home to me recently when I attended a talk by University of Otago archaeologist, Prof. Richard Walter. Prof. Walter was discussing the dubious evidence for alternative theories of how humans came to colonise New Zealand. What frustrated him most, he said, was the ease with which such ‘evidence’ perpetuated on the internet, while the real science behind New Zealand’s colonisation is only available in scientific journals behind a pay wall. The same can be said for alternative views on the safety of vaccination and other health issues.

But herein lies the challenge. For Open Access to really be useful for the public at large, we scientists need to change the way we write about our work. At the very least, every paper published under an Open Access banner should have a summary of the main findings that can be understood by a general audience. Even better would be for whole articles to be written in this way, so that scientists from diverse fields can read each other’s work without needing Wikipedia and a dictionary.

So how do I see my role in science now? Well, the doing science bit hasn’t changed. But I now see that a desire to get the public excited about science isn’t enough. I live in a country bucking international trends with increasing rates of infectious diseases (1**), where sexually transmitted diseases are a growing cause of infertility, and where misinformation on vaccination and health endanger lives. Science can empower people to make informed choices that shape their future for the better. This is the message I want to communicate and why I believe unrestricted access to the science we fund is  in everyone’s best interest.

* Partly as a result of numerous chats with the wonderful Jacquie Bay, director of the Liggins Education Network for Science at the University of Auckland, a fantastic initiative that promotes connections between schools and scientists. Partly because I was lucky enough to attend the late Sir Paul Callaghan’s Transit of Venus Forum in Gisborne earlier this year.

**Alas to access this work, funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Health and the Health Research Council of New Zealand, without a subscription to the Lancet, costs US$31.50 (almost NZ$40). The Lancet is published by Elsevier who, according to Wikipedia, reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion in 2010. Elsevier is currently being boycotted by 12,797 academics in protest over their business practices.

Reference:

1. Baker MG, Telfar Barnard L, Kvalsvig A, Verrall A, Zhang J, Keall M, Wilson N, Wall T, Howden-Chapman P (2012). Increasing incidence of serious infectious diseases and inequalities in New Zealand: a national epidemiological study. The Lancet 379(9821): 1112-1119. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61780-7

Conflict of interest statement:
I am currently a Sir Charles Hercus Fellow, funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand. I am also an associate editor for BMC Biotechnology and on the editorial board of PeerJ, both Open Access journals, and am taking part in the Elsevier boycott.

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Open Access Week 2012 https://sciblogs.co.nz/infectious-thoughts/2012/10/28/open-access-week-2012-2/ Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:04:17 +0000 https://sciblogs.co.nz/infectious-thoughts/?p=903 As Open Access Week draws to a close for 2012, I thought I would follow the fabulous Dr Fabiana Kubke’s lead and post the slides* I presented at the Stratus Open Access panel discussion on Thursday.

[slideshare id=14917746&doc=wilesstratusoaoct2012-121028035611-phpapp01]

Stratus is a network of emerging and early career researchers, primarily at the University of Auckland. We run a number of networking and information events throughout the year. The Open Access panel was part of our ‘Strategies for Success’ stream. Fabiana gave a great introduction to OA and the issue of copyright, while I covered predatory OA publishers**. We also had Prof Alistair Gunn and Prof James Sneyd, both of whom have sat on promotions and staffing committees (and both of whom are excellent value on a panel!). Their feeling was that publishing OA will have no impact on research success although both were dismissive of mega-journals like PLOS One, for having high acceptance rates. Not so great to hear as that has to be one of my favourite journals, but not surprising either.

This week I also wrote a post on open access and the communication of science for Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ. I’ll post it on SciBlogs shortly and would be interested in people’s thoughts. As part of the same strand, Dr Paul Gardener wrote about the cost of OA publishing and looked at which journals represented good value for money (purely in terms of impact factor).

*Slideshare rocks!

**In a nutshell, check out the fantastic Jeffrey Beall‘s blog which has a list of dubious publishers best avoided.

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Kiwi foo’s eye view of Open Science https://sciblogs.co.nz/building-blogs-of-science/2012/02/13/kiwi-foos-eye-view-of-open-science/ Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:13:28 +0000 http://buildingblogsofscience.wordpress.com/?p=813 ]]> I just came back from another amazing kiwi foo. I have talked about it before, so I will not bore you with the details of what kiwi foo is all about. This time, unlike other years, I went with a very focused view of what I wanted to achieve. And it was as stimulating as ever.

Over the past year, I have gone into a rather quiet reflexion of what ‘open science’ is and how to make it work. I have become increasingly frustrated with a model of science that increasingly rewards self-promotion rather than knowledge sharing. And the emerging theme of my reflexion was ‘context’.

If we want a ‘global’ open science, the formula for adoption needs to be able to adapt to local personal, institutional, social, political, economical and legislative contexts. I may be wrong, but I think many of us who support open science struggle at times with how to make it work in the particular contexts in which we need to operate.

As I was struggling with the frustration of the commodification of science over the past two years, I started thinking about the open source community.  I can’t blame universities for encouraging scientists  to produce revenue at a time when public funding for education are research appear to be in constant decline. So I went to Webstock a year ago to try to learn more about how open source projects generate revenue. After all, their business models are built around giving their ‘product’ away for free, something that is well aligned with the ethos of science. One of my highlights at kiwi foo was a conversation with Don Christie from CatalystIT, a company that produces high quality open source software. I am looking forward to continuing this conversation and exploring how these business models can be adapted to the different demands and constraints for science. I got a lot of insight from him, and am hoping he and people like him can help us move forward.

On the second day (or rather the first long day) there were a few sessions that centered around science. Great things came out of it, and it would be impossible to name everyone that provided insight. Nick Jones, Leonie Hayes, Alex Holcombe , Alison Stringer and I partnered in crime and ran a couple of sessions where we hashed a few issues around. I personally wanted to explore what Open Science meant in the New Zealand / Australia context (I can’t speak for the others’ motivations!).  I think that the local context in NZ/OZ is slightly different than in the Northern hemisphere and there are some things that differentiate this region. Perhaps we can/should capitalise on that.

For example, you will never see a ‘Research Works Act’ bill here, because we don’t seem to have Open Access mandates. Instead, we have NZGOAL and AUSGOAL which are frameworks for data licencing. The Australians have ANDS and NZ has eResearch, all focused on the data. Tim O’Reilly mentioned the PantonPrinciples  in this context – but the Panton Principles (which I have personally endoresed) cannot be exported ‘as is’ to Australia and New Zealand because neither Creative Commons AotearoaNew Zealand nor CCAustraliahave CC0, for example.  Software hopefully will not be covered by patents is covered by copyright (not patents) in NZ*, so maybe we can capitalise on that to develop tools for open science. New Zealand has a Treaty of Waitangi, and any local open science needs to respect and work constructively to meet our treaty obligations. Lets add to that, that different research groups are going to be subject to obligations related to the international treaties their countries have signed up to. We all have different copyright restrictions and freedoms, we have different systems that determine how to assign funding, and different mandates and guidelines, and are at different points of our careers with different job securities.

So, how do we make open science work within these diverse contexts? We can all agree on the philosophy, but perhaps we need to also agree that the implementation will take different shapes. I think wee need to continue the global conversation and continue to support each other, but we also need to start working locally in smaller groups to ‘make things happen’. And the battles we choose to fight perhaps should be aligned with local contexts so that we can each capitalise on our strengths. I loved having this dialogue at kiwi foo, getting great insights from a diverse group, and mainly feeling that this is something for which we have support.

The rest of the things that happened at kiwi foo will slowly seep into future posts.

I would really like to thank Jenine, Nat Torkington and Russell Brown for putting kiwi foo together (and inviting me!), my partners in crime Alex, Nick, Alison, and Leonie for their hard work on the sessions, all the attendees for their contributions and especially Tim O’Reilly for providing us with valuable insights. You all have complicated my life, but I look forward to a 2012 of hard work and of ‘making things happen’.

 

*Edited on 16/2/2012 to reflect the correction made by @kayakr (thanks for that!). I was thinking of this bill: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2008/0235/latest/DLM1419230.html (which is probably the one that @kayakr refers to as pending legislation)

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Drafting proposals in the open – sketching out project ideas https://sciblogs.co.nz/building-blogs-of-science/2011/05/04/drafting-proposals-in-the-open-sketching-out-project-ideas/ Wed, 04 May 2011 06:15:51 +0000 http://buildingblogsofscience.wordpress.com/?p=765 ]]> [also posted in http://www.science3point0.com/evomri/2011/05/03/drafting-proposals-in-the-open-sketching-out-project-ideas/] This post is licenced under a CC0

Recapitulation

“Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.” Vannevar Bush, 1945

As announced last week, we – Fabiana Kubke and Daniel Mietchen – are currently participating in the Getting your CC project funded course at Peer-to-Peer University, and have decided to draft our proposal collaboratively and in the open. Part of our motivation is our (and others’) perceived need for making scientific information more useful by positioning it where it can be easily found, used, linked to, repurposed, and updated.

The introductory meeting of the course took place on April 26 (UTC) via Skype. We have since incorporated some of the feedback we got so far, and in this post – which Claudia Koltzenburg helped us draft – we will outline the next steps in the hope to entice others to get involved as well.

The course is scheduled around a series of workshops, each focusing on a different aspect of the proposal-writing process:

  • May 3, Workshop 1: How do we move from having an idea to realizing those ideas in terms of having aims, and goals?
  • May 6, Workshop 2: Which funding bodies are there that can give financial support, and how do we find appropriate sponsors for our project?
  • May 10, Workshop 3: How can we structure our proposed work in terms of tasks and how do we make a realistic timeline?
  • May 17, Workshop 4: Knowing how long time we estimate, and the resources we need, how do we put together a reasonable budget?
  • May 24, Workshop 5: What happens after the funding period is over? How do we make the project sustainable?
  • May 31, Workshop 6: What would we look at when reviewing another proposal.

The grant proposals are to be drafted in parallel to these workshops until June, when the proposals produced will be peer-reviewed, and professional feedback will be provided to increase the chances of getting funded. In preparation for today’s workshop, we will use this post to explore the aims and goals of our project(s).

The candidate projects in a nutshell

The ideas submitted as part of the application for the course all center around what could be thought of as an Encyclopaedia of original research, which shall therefore be the default focus of the grant proposal (as idea 1). Two smaller projects (ideas 2 and 3) build on idea 1 but are more specific and could thus be integrated into a proposal about idea 1, or developed independently, whereas idea 4 is wider in scope than idea 1. We expect the final scope of our grant proposal to be defined more precisely before attending Workshop 3.

“In the academy [..] we need to recognise an ethical obligation […] which is at the core of our mission which is universal access to knowledge.” Larry Lessig, in the video embedded below, which is CC-BY-licensed.

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from Lessig on Vimeo.

Idea 1: The primary aim of the Encyclopaedia of original research (henceforth EOR) is to arrange the existing scientific literature in a way that allows it to become dynamic in nature. The primary goal is to develop a platform that is able to capture and archive the open scientific literature such that the original work is being preserved (like at arXive or PubMed Central) but becomes dynamically and collaboratively editable (like at OpenWetWare). By way of such a platform, scientists and others could share their knowledge more effectively than through papers: Work on related matters could be more easily identified and conceptualized, and so could gaps in knowledge. Besides the possibility for direct editing, facilities for annotation, commenting and other ways of interaction with the community of researchers in the field would ensure the widest possible peer review.

The Encyclopaedia of original research combines two of the principles for open science that have been put forward by Science Commons: it takes the “Open Access” literature and recognizes that it too – like data – is a lost opportunity “without structure and annotation”. The characteristics of the platform that would contain the encyclopaedia are complex: it needs to track individual contributions to enable proper attribution, the content needs to be granular enough to be able to be cite individual elements within an entire piece, individual pieces of works or elements within it need to be able to be dynamically linked, indexed and contextualized, and the metadata needs to be structured to enhance discoverability, an attribute that is essential for reuse. The user interface also needs to be suitable for the different technological levels of knowledge or levels of comfort appropriate for individual scientists, so that technology is not a barrier for adoption and/or contribution.

We expect that the encyclopaedia will benefit science by helping to avoid duplication of research efforts (and related funding), providing a faster means of updating information otherwise delayed by prevalent publication cycles or not deemed “worthy” of formal publication (practical example case) and promoting the open discussion of research findings in light of new evidence.

The approach, though initially focused on contemporary literature, could likewise be applied to legacy literature – a start in this direction has already been made, as discussed here.

Idea 2: The aim here is to take advantage of such a repository to facilitate the delivery of scientific and health-related information to remote areas where this information may not be readily available but where access to it is essential for the well-being of those communities. What we imagine is that the above EOR could incorporate (or lead to) lay summaries (similar to AcaWiki of the scientific literature or such as those that already exist in blogs) as part of its knowledge base and both the original research as the lay summaries can be translated to local languages. Specific content that is relevant to specific world regions (e.g., malaria in Africa, Chagas in South America) can be bundled in formats that are compatible with existing local technology. One way to at least partially achieve this goal is to bundle region-relevant information so that it can take advantage of ongoing deployments associated with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and where it can reach the communities that would benefit most from that research.

Idea 3: The aim here is to take advantage of the infrastructure of the EOR (and part of the information contained within it) to complement (or support) digital collections not typically considered part of the scientific “literature”, e.g. from museums or databases. Take, for example this artifact from the Matapihi digital collection. The interaction of the user with the digital object could be enhanced by linking it to different representations of the same specimen (say, an MRI scan), or to relevant scientific information pertaining to similar specimens. It could further be brought back to life by linking it to other cultural artifacts: for instance, ‘Have specific works of poetry or music been inspired by these types of specimens?’, or ‘Are there local traditions or myths that are associated with the artifact?’, or ‘Is there a personal notebook of the individual who brought this specimen to where it is? As an example, this other digital object from the New Zealand National Library presents not just the artifact but the cultural context of what the object represents and how it relates to the local cultural heritage.

The fate of these ideas will depend on how the grant writing develops; the project as a whole could be shrunk to either of these projects (or similar ones), or these projects could be spinned off or retired.

Idea 4: The project could in principle also be expanded in scope, e.g. to test the efficiency of open versus traditional science. However, in order to produce a competitive grant on this big issue, we would require considerable support from beyond our current team of three.

The next steps

By May 10, we will need to identify in a first instance the type (or types) of funding bodies that would be suitable (at least in principle) to fund and/or sponsor the project. We would like to invite feedback and suggestions for that part of the process as well. For that purpose, we have set up a page on Wikiversity were we will be aggregating the relevant feedback we receive, and draft the next blog post in this series.

We would also like to invite feedback on which platform would be most suitable for the drafting of the full proposal. Different wiki spaces seem to be appropriate, as are Google Docs, but the idea of drafting it on GitHub is also on the table.

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Opening up [I think] https://sciblogs.co.nz/building-blogs-of-science/2010/09/23/opening-up-i-think/ Thu, 23 Sep 2010 09:45:42 +0000 http://buildingblogsofscience.wordpress.com/?p=726 ]]> What does it mean, in science, to be open?

I don’t know.

by Darwin Bell

I wrote a while back, that while I endorse the principles of ‘openness‘, I struggle with the issue of ‘how‘. Since then I have been trying to listen and learn. [Or, better said, shut up and listen.] I started trying to see what hurdles I encountered trying to work exclusively on Open Source Software. I joined the Learning4Content course at WikiEducator. I started looking into platforms that would fit my needs as an open lab notebook. I tried to follow the Open Science Summit. I listened hard at sessions at SciFoo Camp. I went to some New Zealand open data discussions. I became an Academic Editor at PLoS ONE. I joined the panel of the Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand.

And after several months of ‘listening’ the one thing that keeps popping in my head is:

kubke, you ain’t gonna figure it out by yourself.

The loudest message that I heard is, perhaps, that there is not a single, simple, one-size-fits-all answer, and that it just may come down to fumbling through until we figure it out.

So, I decided to fumble.

I am taking in Summer students this summer to work on a project that I will try to make as ‘open’ as possible.

I am leaning towards a few things:

  • I am pretty sure I want to give Mahara a go as a platform for the day-to-day ‘lab’ stuff.
  • I am pretty sure I want to regularly put as much as I can into my space in OpenWetWare.
  • I am pretty sure I want to try to shift my imaging to Open Source Software (e.g., Osirix, ImageJ, Cell Profiler)
  • am pretty sure I want to put the work out there as it is being gathered.

What I am not so sure about is how this will work. It will be a steep learning curve, but one thing that I am hoping is that by giving it a go I may begin to get the answers.

And hopefully some of the smart people out there might give me a hand and help me steer the boat in the right direction.

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Open [Education] Sunday — 07.02.10 https://sciblogs.co.nz/building-blogs-of-science/2010/02/07/open-education-sunday-07-02-10/ Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:33:19 +0000 http://buildingblogsofscience.wordpress.com/?p=468 ]]> One of the miniconferences I attended while at Linux.conf.au 2010 was on education. There I heard a presentation by Mark Osborne, the Deputy Principal from Albany Senior High School. This is the first large scale open source school, and the news have not gone unnoticed (see here and here, for example). There are several advantages to going open source in education, but perhaps one of the ones that I find more compelling, is that by using this type of approach, students are able to use at home the same software that they use at school without having to pay for individual licensing.

In another session centered on education, WikiEduator was brought up. I do not remember how it is I first came across this site, but I love it. My impression from browsing through it is that it is mainly geared towards Primary and Secondary education, and although a lot of resources are there already, it is clear that the site would benefit from more contributions <nudge>. (Bu the way, Albany High School is sharing their resources there.)

A similar teaching sharing space (which is probably more geared towards Tertiary education) can also be found in OpenWetware, which among other things, offers the opportunity to host courses on the site. This is a great opportunity to build collaborations between different tertiary educators in a way that is quite similar to WikiEducator. I am now looking at ways to contribute to this aspect of the site.

There is something that I like about these two sites over the concept of iTunes University. Although centered about opening education and making it generally available, I find the wikis are more amenable to collaboration between different groups of educators. Don’t get me wrong, I love iTunesU, and I am attending classes there, but I think a lot can be also gained from collaborative spaces.

If you are an educator looking for open resources, you might want to look at this link from @tabitharoder (who by the way also was behind the organization of the education miniconference at Linux.conf.au 2010).

And, it was recently pointed out to me by Cameron Neylon, that, at least in the UK Universities are considered commercial institutions. Therefore the Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA licence that this blog was under, does not extend to all educational use. I presume the same may apply in other parts of the world. I have struggled with this, and made the decision to change the licencing of this blog to a BY-SA  licence, which is described by Creative Commons Aotearoa/New Zealand:

This licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of the licences offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This licence is often compared to open source software licences. All new works based on yours will carry the same licence; so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

You should now see the new logo up on this site.

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