According to their website “The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies who are establishing a set of principles for ontology development with the goal of creating a suite of orthogonal interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain”. This week they are having a workshop in Cambridge, to bring myself up to speed, here is a quick name check of some of the people involved.
* Michael Ashburner, University of Cambridge
* Erick Antezana, University of Ghent
* Colin Batchelor, Royal Society of Chemistry - Duncan Hull
Biomedical science has never been more exciting or productive. Research tools have become increasingly powerful, and progress continues to accelerate. Yet, these are stressful times for many biomedical scientists, because competition for grant support, jobs, and publishing in the most prestigious journals is also accelerating. The stress associated with publishing experimental results--a process that can take as long as obtaining the results in the first place--can drain much of the joy from practicing science. - Duncan Hull
I'm not paying $10 to read a letter to a GlamorMag. - Bill Hooker
"Both editors and referees could help. Referees need to be more thoughtful when recommending additional experiments and to make sure that these experiments are truly needed to justify publication. Editors should insist that reviewers rigorously justify each new experiment that they request. They should also ask reviewers to estimate how much time and effort the experiment might require. With this information in hand, editors can more easily override referees'excessive demands. This requires confident, knowledgeable, and experienced editors, and it risks alienating referees, who are often hard to come by. Nonetheless, editors should be encouraged and empowered to perform this crucial task." - Duncan Hull
"A more radical solution, which is already used by some journals, is to have editors and their relevant editorial board members triage papers so that only those that meet the criteria of interest, novelty, and importance appropriate for the journal are sent out for formal review. This will save reviewers' time. In addition, papers that clear this initial hurdle can then be reviewed solely for scientific accuracy, appropriateness of controls, clear writing, and justification of the conclusions." - Duncan Hull
This thing called Science, whatever it is, who actually owns it? Scientists? Technology companies? Industrial Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies? Investors? Shareholders? Governments? Universities? Philanthropists? Charities? Publishers? Joe Public? Or none of the above…? - Duncan Hull
I’m not much of an evolutionary biologist, but Jonathan Eisen asked for help and I can’t resist. So, in the name of Science, here is some deserved Google Juice for various Trees of Life on the Web. - Duncan Hull
Yeah, spread the ❤ link love ❤ (in the name of Science) - Duncan Hull
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has sequenced the equivalent of 300 human genomes in just over six months. The Institute has just reached the staggering total of 1,000,000,000,000 letters of genetic code that will be read by researchers worldwide - Duncan Hull
Essentially the typical DOI link presents an elementary web-based URL which performs a useful redirect service. What is different about this and, say a PURL, which offers a similar redirect service? What's the big deal? - Duncan Hull
"being a successful scientist ain't f**king rocket science, and doesn't require “genius” or any other type of magical intellectual prowess. It is a profession like any other, and the skills necessary to succeed can be learned. I consider this an important point to convey as an aspect of making science much more inclusive to people other than well-off white dudes." - Duncan Hull
Is being a scientist is so easy, then why is there so many 'unsuccessful' papers? - Egon Willighagen
What do you mean with "unsuccessful" papers? - dekay
I don't think Drug Monkey is saying "science is easy", just that it's not necessarily all genius-only rocket-science... It is a Profession practiced by trained Professionals (most of the time) - Duncan Hull
The NeOn project is seeking to create an open, service-centred reference architecture for managing the complete lifecycle of networked ontologies. This architecture is realised through the NeOn Toolkit, a new generati - Duncan Hull
If one consults with doctors when practicing medicine, surely one ought to consult with statisticians when practicing statistics? - Duncan Hull
Duncan, interesing point... should we have those organizations for science too, who can put other scientists out of business, because of bad practice? - Egon Willighagen
Scientist Police you mean? Who polices the policemen? - Duncan Hull
PsyBlog has collected the responses to its request for the most annoying psychobabble and you can now vote for your favourite worst offender. - Duncan Hull
In a move likely to up the ante in the emerging Open Source Drug Discovery movement, GlaxoSmithKline have announced the donation of genomic profiling data for over 300 cancer cell lines to the National Cancer Institute's cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) - Duncan Hull
