Cameron Neylon

+1 for Dorothea's point. Also willingness of publishers/content supporters to work with others rather than set up separate silos and have their own internal persistent author ids / data structures / etc - Sarah

unique IDs would help - Richard Akerman

+1 for all three comments above. - Bill Hooker

Ideas are ahead of the technology..... - Maxine

yeah, what Dorothea said. At this point all of the barriers are social. - Euan

Agree with what Dorothea said. I also think that the technology is there, but the execution isn't yet (not excluding Mendeley). - Victor / Mendeley Team

I think there is also an incentive problem -- i.e. journal article still being Coin of the Realm, to the point that nothing else is valued by tenure and promotion committees. - Dorothea Salo

hmmm - actually this was missing from the middle of a microblogging session from the psb meeting (http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ps...). But thanks for your input all! - Cameron Neylon

I would say that the roadmap and marketing strategy (I really mean marketing) would be the next step. Barriers are not really social - as Paulo wrote some time ago, lots of scientists have no idea about the concept and no time to find all the details. - Pawel Szczesny

Cluelessness IS a social barrier. - Dorothea Salo

Cluelessness is not an issue - lack of strategy to spread the word and to show that the concept works *is* an issue. And it's our problem, not somebody's else. - Pawel Szczesny

Chicken-egg problem. We can't show the concept works if nobody's doing it. Also, lack of incentive plays in, and maybe *you* have an impact on what tenure committees do, but I sure don't. - Dorothea Salo

we just have to keep discussing specific examples - Jean-Claude Bradley

"just"? - Dorothea Salo

@Dorothea yes I think that demonstrating simple examples and showing people exactly how to implement simple techniques and telling stories of how researchers benefited is necessary and sufficient to getting a critical mass of people involved - Jean-Claude Bradley

Well, respectfully, I disagree. Busy researchers will not listen without external incentive. Maybe that comes from funders, maybe from administrators, but without it, you are howling into the void IMO. - Dorothea Salo

Dorothea, that's why I don't think we have any "social" barriers. Scientists may be willing, but have no external incentives, and no idea about the concept. We don't have much power over grant agencies, but we at least can spread the word out, just as Jean-Claude says. - Pawel Szczesny

Well, the creation of incentive is a social process; there's certainly nothing technological about it. So is spreading the word, and *especially* so is having it heeded. I do think peer pressure is important, but I go back to John Wilbanks's talk: researchers pay attention to what will keep them researchers as opposed to burger-flippers at McD's. If this vision can't plausibly do that, it's hosed. - Dorothea Salo

Wish I was there, mate. Land-locked in Maryland :-( - Jim Hardy

Well life's like that - must run, sun to catch, beer to drink... - Cameron Neylon

I didn't say I wasn't drinking beer... :-) - Jim Hardy

In that snow? ;-) - Cameron Neylon

Maybe you need yet another Wev 2.0 tool for this such as Doodle or Pingg: http://www.doodle.com/ or http://www.pingg.com/ - Martin Fenner

I think it's mostly a matter of time - eventually I can see there being multiple online communication "carriers" the way there are for mobile phones. But at that point there may be no distinction between "mobile phones" and online communication anyway? We're almost there already... - Shirley Wu

Usually friends divide for "web guys" and "non-web" - the first category have everything - facebook, friendfeed, twitter, email, linkedin...ect, so they gonna get a lot of similar messages about your visit, 2nd category maximum what they have is phone and email, so if they didn't update their file (contact) somewhere online - very hard to get them, especially after few years when phone # and email could change, but keep in touch all the time with all of them very hard - Alexey

I agree Alexey, but you can't make status updates any easier than twitter. It's about as barebones simple as it can get, so if that doesn't work for them, nothing will. - Mr. Gunn

"It’s not just filter failure which is creating the impression of the information overload. The tools we are using, their incompatibility, and the cost of transferring items from one stream to another are also contributing to the problem." "What should happen is that I have a collection of people, I choose the send them a message, whether private or broadcast, and they choose how to receive that message and how to prioritise it. They then reply to me, and I see all their responses nicely aggregated because they are all related to my one query. ... The point is that each person controls the way they receive information from different streams and is in control of the way they deal with it." - Jodi Schneider

Also makes you realise that it can be worthwhile not the studiously ignore all those people sharing your public transport. You don't have to go online to interact with people ;-) - Cameron Neylon

Interesting discussion. I definitely always try to find the original source of quoted statistics or studies in news article. It's easy for me because I have access to my school's library databases (e.g. JSTOR, Lexus Nexus, etc), so I am able to access information that others have to pay for. However, even if it's an excerpt, the studies should be available to the public. - Shevonne Polastre

Most interesting, Cameron. Thanks for blogging it ! - Graham Steel

It's a problem across all disciplines in scholarly publishing. No one believes that anyone outside of academe has a serious interest in the content. I think that's wrong, but there is significant reluctance on the part of most institutional players (in both the public or private sectors) in taking on the additional costs implied by proposed broad-scale access models for a relatively limited no. of folks.. (That's just what it looks like to me, sitting in the cheap seats.) - Jill O'Neill

What a great story, thank you for sharing it. - Denton Gentry

Great read Cameron, I'm going to have to subscribe! - Daniel J. Pritchett

My comment got too long and involved, so I turned it into a post instead: http://scienceblogs.com/clock/... - Bora Zivkovic

That's the best kind of comment, Bora. +100 CN to you. (http://www.louisgray.com/live/...) - Daniel J. Pritchett

Well said. maybe I should be riding the train more often. - lester

I wonder how many journals/publishers do what Nature journals do and host datasets /link to databases (eg PDB) in their online Supplementary Information (linked online to paper) which is freely available (requires registration)? (the paper itself, describing the data, is in the subscription bit). And I wonder if this is generally known. - Maxine

I s'pose my question is: we keep whining and complaining about the low level of scientific literacy in this country, but we won't actually let anyone see any science? what's up with that? - Dorothea Salo

since C took stats in college a few years back, I've been telling anyone who will listen that I think *everyone* needs to take at least a little stats. and when I explain *why* (more critical understanding of the news, mostly) most have the lightbulb moment. but...if people do get that level of savvy, then they really do want and need the access to more detailed info! IME taking stats makes you hunger to know what isn't being told. also, what a great story, thanks for sharing it. - Elaine Nelson

I've gotten pretty good at taking what few facts they do give in press releases and digging back to the original paper. Most of the time, the only usable information is the name of one of the people and his institutional affiliation. For biomedical stuff, you can usually use their name to dig up a list of recent publications and maybe find the data that way, but for other disciplines, it's more difficult. Physics has arXiv, but beyond that I'm usually lost. - Mr. Gunn

nice anecdote to have handy in discussions of OS - Jean-Claude Bradley