Praxis: http://scienceblogs.com/clock... - Bora Zivkovic

Praxis#1: http://scienceblogs.com/clock... - Bora Zivkovic

Ah, well I don't want to step on any toes, Bora. I see that Praxis covers all aspects of scientific life in academia including science 2.0; is there room for an additional carnival focused solely on open science/science 2.0 topics? It wouldn't just be academia either. - Shirley Wu

The idea occurred simultaneously on two blogs: Lay Science, and Plausible Accuracy and we had discussions about the idea and decided that the OA-only carnival would not have enough people/posts to sustain itself at this moment. Perhaps later, as an offshoot of Praxis (just like all the science carnivals are offshoots of Tangled Bank). - Bora Zivkovic

I noticed that Cameron commented (on Plausible Accuracy) that a carnival might not be the best way to round up open science related content to begin with. I'm thinking a round up that's not limited to blogs would help form a better bigger picture; it feels like there's been a spate of articles on the subject lately. Anyway, clearly I need to think about this more - Shirley Wu

We (well, Pedro) ran a bioinformatics carnival (but called it a blog journal) for some time. Quite successful, but a lot of work for the editors (well, Pedro) and it was difficult to get contributions. I suspect the "open science crowd" are similar to the "bioinformatics crowd" in their aversion, for want of a better word, to carnival format. But I do agree that the time is right to start rounding up resources. A wiki project, maybe? - Neil Saunders

Well how about a biogang project. A special open science fork of postgenomic? - Deepak Singh

An aggregator such as Pg definitely makes sense; enough people using phrases + tags "open science", "science 2.0" etc. now to pick them up. - Neil Saunders

(1) The only way to find out whether there's content for a carnival is to host it. (2) The existence of a carnival inspires content generation. (3) A carnival isn't exclusive of other types of aggregation, so the implicit "either/or" isn't valid. - Chris Patil

(4) Running a carnival isn't that much work. (5) Is there any evidence beyond the level of assertion that "open science" people (is that a type?) don't like carnivals? (6) These alternative suggestions, the wiki etc., are great: The suggesters should totally implement them. - Chris Patil

Chris, I'm just floating alternative ideas, not rubbishing carnivals. You want carnival, go carnival :) - Neil Saunders

Point taken. I guess I was just unpleasantly surprised by the extent to which the conversation was weighted in the direction of "Why this wouldn't work," "Why this didn't work," and "Someone already thought of this" rather than "How might we best make something like this work?" and "Kudos to Shirley for suggesting it." So to re-ask the question in another way: Is there value in aggregating blog and other writing regarding open science (not just open access), and what would be the ideal format for that? - Chris Patil

Sure, we should do both. I like Praxis because it is not an echo-chamber and draws into the conversation people who do not think about OA and Science 2.0 much but are in the Academia and need to know it. - Bora Zivkovic

Here's my submission, by the way. http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2008... I have another appropriate piece coming out later in the week about the PLoS Biology article re: gene functional annotation - Chris Patil

I like this idea. I'd be more than happy to host an edition at my blog and it would also be great to have it on OWW Community blog. Will try submit something asap. - Ricardo Vidal

Here is a suggestion that goes beyond a carnival. It's less editorial and more one stop shop. In the programming world, you have the "Planet XYZ" types of aggregators (e.g. Planet Ruby, Planet RDF, etc). How about a Planet Open Science aggregator? Perhaps we can do a hybrid of a Planet/Carnival approach since many of us talk about so many things other than just open science - Deepak Singh

Here's another entry, which I mentioned yesterday: http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2008... - Chris Patil

Nice post, Chris. Excuse a silly question, but is this what WikiGenes is doing? - Maxine

Chris's post was about the Gene Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki..., http://dx.doi.org/10...). WikiGenes is something _completely_ different (http://www.wikigenes.org/, http://dx.doi.org/10...). Can't imagine why anyone would be confused... ;) - Andrew Su

Andrew ... lol. Won't be the last time either - Deepak Singh

Thanks! Well at least I'd heard of it...now I'll have a go at understanding them both. - Maxine