I think it means that bloggers get access to papers before publication like science journalists do, provided they don't break the news before the official release? Can someone clarify? - Neil Saunders
They have done that unofficially in the past, so looks like they are formalizing part of that process - Deepak
@Neil Yeah, you can't blog about it until after the embargo date has passed. - Euan
This is great. Levels the field for bloggers wanting to work as science journalists. - Pedro Beltrao
"Bloggers wishing to apply for inclusion in our press list should do so through our contact form including links to 6 blog postings written by them in the last 6 months discussing the content of primary research papers. " - Mr. Gunn
Very cool! Thanks for the heads up :) - Ricardo Vidal
Yes, it is already happening to some degree. I'm a blogger and PLoS sends me the same email announcing upcoming papers that they send to professional journalists. Often times they attach the real deal PDF to the article. - Kambiz Kamrani
Take the 2-3 topics of general interest, wash them thoroughly, until completely free of criticism and discussion. We recommend today 'Dark Energy', 'Quantum Gravity', and 'Large Hadron Collider', or whatever this week's special offer of your local blog scene is. Unwrap the prepared frequently used words, and carefully check whether some have become stale over night.
In a large, non-stick pan, warm the topics of general interest over medium heat. Add the frequently used words and cook until thickened to less than 10 sentences. Add ½ cup of superlatives and mash them with the back of a wooden spoon. Gradually stir in the parameters and simmer together for 4 to 5 minutes. - Duncan Hull
Confirmed. Because of larger social networks, I guess... - Egon Willighagen
seems related with domain expertise, your own institution only knows so much, the sweet spot is about 5 collaborators. It was a great talk, the work is under review at the moment, hopefully it will be out soon. I'm going to blog up the talk later when I get a chance. - Ian Mulvany
This lines up in my mind with Andy Powell's talk I saw at Talis a few weeks back where he pointed out that 'the institution' really lines up with real social or collaborative networks - Cameron Neylon
I usually just say it is a type of Partial Open Notebook Science - Jean-Claude Bradley
I still don't believe in scooping :) - Neil Saunders
I think delayed notebooks wouldn't prevent scooping, considering that scooping in notebooks is even an issue. - Ricardo Vidal
I am with Neil .. and after this weeks workshop even more frustrated - Deepak
I put in my more than two cents on this thread. I think the jury is out on which model works for which scientific field until more people from more fields try it out. So far there are a couple physicists, chemists, one molecular embryologist :-) and perhaps some biostatisticians? but we need larger sample sizes and more representativity. Where are the astronomers, the mathematicians (presuming they even keep lab notebooks), the geneticists, the cell biologists...? - Heather
How long does it take comments to come up at Scienceblogs? I made two some five hours ago... maybe the moderators are still in bed or something. Grumble. - Heather
Can anyone point to an example of scooping? I don't think it happens nearly as much as people think, and as you all know, proper ONS uses timestamps anyways, right? - Mr. Gunn
@Mr Gunn: I can give you one example of an attempt, when a certain Prof Scumbag found out from my PhD supervisor what I was working on, he put a postdoc on the same question. Happily I knew the postdoc, and he just kept "oh, I haven't got to that" until I'd published! Note that I have no proof, you'd have to take my word for this. Similarly, stories abound: I don't think I've met a PI who didn't have a story of someone throwing together a sloppy paper to scoop their conference presentation. - Bill Hooker
...cont'd: Very seldom does anyone take actual action. All I did, after all, was sabotage the attempt: I didn't make a formal complaint. We all know why I didn't, but that doesn't make it right. I have only one example where action was taken: this paper (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.g...) contains this addendum (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.g...) only because a senior scientist complained to journal editors and so on. - Bill Hooker
...cont'd: For instance, I could point to a paper which contains a bunch of crap (I can vouch for this) because it was slapped together after A saw B's presentation at a conference (I can't verify this -- which is why I won't point to it). My point, and at long last I do have one, is that timestamps are only half the answer. The other half is a willingness to follow up, assuming good faith error but willing to lay on the hurt if there really is a bad actor involved. - Bill Hooker
I've heard about people slapping together papers after seeing a conference presentation, and conceivably one could do the same after seeing an online presentation about research too. Now the question is whether such slapped together papers end up in better journals and cited more than the more complete research reports. If the slapping together is done by a more well-known lab, I can certainly see this being a problem, but I can also see well known successful labs being less likely to be bad actors. - Mr. Gunn
"whether such slapped together papers end up in better journals and cited more" I think they usually do, because the culture places such a premium on being first. - Bill Hooker
Short-term, maybe, but long term, like over 10 years, would the sloppy paper be expected to have the most cites? Want to find some crap papers from 1998 and do a quick experiment to see? - Mr. Gunn
I'm always in favor of finding out by experiment, but I don't have time for that one right now... Thinking more about it, I would expect the sloppy papers to have a shorter half-life just as you indicate. Problem is, science is self-correcting on a long timescale, but grant/hire/tenure decisions aren't. I do like your proposed expt; maybe put it on a BioGang backburner and let it simmer a while? - Bill Hooker
I would add it to the wiki, but it seems that my registration has yet to be approved... - Mr. Gunn
Mr. Gunn when did you apply for an account at OWW? - Ricardo Vidal
Correlations are a way of catching a scientist's attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications. - Richard Akerman
Thanks, I've seen similar programs but they all stipulate that they are for visits to distant laboratories for training purposes, and tend to be in experimental biology areas. I'm looking for something more general that can fund trips to conferences or workshops, not exp bio related, not necessarily presenting a talk, etc... - Shirley Wu
I believe that many of the "institutional" conference organizers (CSHL, GRC, etc.) provide travel funds. I'm not sure about general funds for any conference (outside of the benefits that certain fellowships carry). Are you looking at anything in particular? - dsbreak
You mean like slush funds? It seems like it is rare for there to be a pot of money for unrestricted travel for students unless you get it through a general fellowship that gives a chunk of money that is unrestricted. I don't know if you can spend money from an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant that way, but you have to get that funded for your research work. I think NSF Minority travel award might be another way, but only some qualify of course: http://rurl.org/u8o - Jason Stajich
Our graduate student association provides a few travel scholarships a year. - Mr. Gunn
I've tried to collate all the feedback that was given last time. Any more feedback on this version is welcome. I've outlined the focus of the survey in the first paragraph. - Michael Barton
I've just finished. Looks very good. Looking forwards to see the results. - Pawel Szczesny
'Liked' but I guess not filling it out - can hardly call myself a bioinformatician :) - Cameron Neylon
What Cam said. I "liked" it to give it extra juice here, make sure everyone sees it. - Bill Hooker
Michael was suggesting starting it officially on the 1st of July and let it run for a month before collecting the results and analyzing them. If we get enough numbers maybe the results will be interesting enough to send to a science news sections of some journal (The Scientists, Nature News, ...). If we get a bit of coordinated promotion on the 1st of July it would be great :D - Pedro Beltrao
I'm on holiday on 1 July - can I schedule a 'like' to pop in then? - Cameron Neylon
Send me a reminder, or post one here, and I'll blog the effort. Won't do much but every little bit helps. Betcha Jonathan Eisen would blog it too, and he has way more readers than me. Ditto Bora. - Bill Hooker
@Egon. I understand your point but I had to try and limit this question to a small subset of categories, so I used those from Bioinformatics. With too many, the analysis becomes less significant as it's spread out over a broader range. I know it's tenuous but metabolomics could be put under Systems Biology? - Michael Barton
After discussion with Pedro, we also thought it might be interesting to release all the data under a CC license so anyone can contribute to the analysis. Have to update the disclaimer at the top though. - Michael Barton
Well, in feel that bioinformatics is not just DNA/RNA sequence stuff, but the full biochemistry, but I recognize the thing that people say bioinformatics is blast++. A shame, really, because I thought the field recognized by now that an organism is more than it's blueprint. - Egon Willighagen
Done. I skipped the "bioinformatics tools apart from software development" - because I mostly write my own; and the "web applications" - because there's just way too many. Maybe a select list and then list up to 3 "other" would have been better. - Neil Saunders
Everyone Owns Science, trouble is, all these pesky publishers think they own science, slapping their restrictive copyright over everything :) - Duncan Hull
Nah - they just own the typesetting, the important stuff is in the public domain... - Cameron Neylon
How the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowships work. This program was apparently responsible in part for the Capetown declaration on open textbooks. - Michael Nielsen
Everything is set up, including the poster - anyone can preview it by clicking on it - I hope to see some FF folks over there in a few hours - Jean-Claude Bradley
Unfortunately I won't be able to make it due to timezones, but I dropped in just a moment ago and had a flick through the presentation board. I've a much better perspective on what 23andMe (and 23andWe) is all about now. Now I *really* want my SNPs read :) - Andrew Perry
I probably won't make it because of timezone issues :( - Cameron Neylon
10am Pacific = Can't make it :( ... someone screencast the thing :) - Deepak
A fusion of Zotero with Connotea would be close to perfect for me - Pedro Beltrao
Zotero + CiteULike in my case. Firefox extension development isn't that difficult if you know Javascript - I'm sure someone could get this to work. - Neil Saunders
We can share calendars and address books, why not reference managers? - Martin Fenner
How I would have loved this a decade ago. We had this super complex versioning system for our groups (which was rather large) endnote library - Deepak
@Martin, technically we can share reference manager data, it's just a hellish nightmare of lossy conversions between EndNote / BibTeX / RIS / Refworks / XML / Atom / RSS etc :) - Duncan Hull
Nice summary of pros and cons of ref managers as well - Cameron Neylon
What should be the standard format for bibiographic data? RIS and BibTex are popular, but not XML. MODS XML? - Martin Fenner
The new Bibliographic Ontology, maybe? Haven't actually looked much at it... - Euan
