Science Library Pad

Canadian microsat to look for near-earth asteroids

Canada is preparing to launch the first space mission ever to search for asteroids between Earth and the sun -- the type of asteroid most likely to slam into our planet.

Fittingly for this country, the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite is not a Hubble-sized monster. It's a 60-kilogram microsatellite, costing a mere $10 million, yet able to deliver science results never seen before.

NEOSSat will search for asteroids that are closer to the sun than Earth. These are nearly impossible to see from our planet's surface -- there's too much atmosphere and sunshine -- but easier to spot from space.

canada.com - Canada space mission targets asteroids - May 02, 2008

Since newspaper science articles are notoriously bad at accurately explaining things, you can also read

The Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat) Mission Enables an Efficient Space-Based Survey (NESS Project) of Interior-to-Earth-Orbit (IEO) Asteroids (PDF)
by
Hildebrand A.R., Tedesco E.F., Carroll K.A., Cardinal R.D., Matthews J.M., Kuschnig R., Walker G.A.H., Gladman, B., Kaiser, N.R., Brown P.G., Larson S.M., Worden, S.P., Wallace, B.J., Cho-das P.W., Muinonen K., Cheng A., Gural P.
from Lunar and Planetary Science XXXVIII (2007)

I couldn't find a Wikipedia article for it, so I made one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Surveillance_Satellite

Obscure historical sidebar: B. Gladman was also a student of my grad astrophysics supervisor.  A much, much better student.

2008 Canadian BioTalent

Teenage scientists are gathering this week at the Canada Science and Technology Museum for the Eastern Ontario regional competition in biotechnology. Eleven student projects will be displayed and presented to the judging panel, composed of local researchers and leaders in the field of biotechnology.

The Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge (SABC) introduces students to the real world of biotechnology by carrying out research projects of their own design. Each student team works with a mentor, who provides expert advice and access to equipment and supplies.

The Canada Science and Technology Museum donates an award to the project team demonstrating the highest calibre of scientific interpretation. Other prizes include scholarships at local institutions and summer jobs at the National Research Council. Nearly $10,000 in prizes will be given out at the ceremony on April 30 [2008].

Canada Science and Technology Museum - News Releases - Ottawa’s top biotechnology students compete in regional competition

In 2008, with increased support from BioTalent Canada the competition will be face-to-face where 14 regional winners will compete for the National title in Ottawa. The top 2 winners of the National SABC Competition will be able to compete in the sanofi-aventis International BioGENEius Challenge at the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) Annual International Convention.

THE 2008 NATIONAL COMPETITION: May 6th [2008]
2008 AWARDS CEREMONY: May 7th [2008]
LOCATION: THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL CANADA IN OTTAWA

http://sanofibiotalentchallenge.ca/national-competition/

The Canada Science and Technology Museum will be having an accompanying Biotechnology Lecture Series on May 6 & 7, 2008.  A couple examples from their schedule:

May 6 - 11:15 a.m.
Dr. John Bell
“Using Viruses to Kill Cancer Cells”

May 7 - 1:00 p.m.
Dr. Mads Kaern and students from University of Ottawa
“Genetically engineered machines:  Their scientific and economic potential”

Second Nature: Science and Science Fiction

Title: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Speakers: Prof Mark Brake and Rev. Neil Hook, Glamorgan University

Date: Mon 28th April [2008]

Time: 9am SLT, Midday NY time, 4pm GMT, 5pm London time

Location: Second Nature Island

from Nature Network - Joanna Scott's blog

I certainly think a common background of consuming science fiction informs both physics and computer science (the only science areas I've worked in).

OR08 - the presentation layer is destroying our data

I have lots of raw notes, but I'll wait to see whether the presentations show up at the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository (for some reason, I keep wanting to spell this "respository").

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

One of the main themes that I've heard in terms of doing science with repositories over the past couple days is that presentation formats, particularly PDF, are destroying the data (e.g. chemical structures and reactions) that we have so carefully assembled.  Then we have to make machines work really hard to try to reconstruct this data, which is madness to me (although I accept it may be the only practical solution in the near term).

I would argue that HTML plays a similar role in emphasizing "what looks good" rather than adding to that "and is also usable by machines under the hood".

And in a different way, PowerPoint, with its constraints of display and its style of bullet points, discards our complex ideas and presents them in a lossy, radically oversimplified way (with a dependency of course on the skills of the presenters).

TeacherTube studycast: Rock meets Lichen

One of my friends is a middle school teacher who tries to find ways to usefully integrate technology with his teaching.  This is an animation his students made, "Rock meets Lichen"

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=b818fffa3e8045eb95a6

You can find all of their studycasts on his wiki at

http://studycasts.wikispaces.com/Studycasts

Trouble with Medical Journals?

Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian newsanchor, interviews Richard Smith, former BMJ editor, author of The Trouble with Medical Journals.

30 minute Windows Media video

http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/oneonone/20071124.wmv

Book info at

http://www.rsmpress.co.uk/bksmith.htm

Open Repositories 2008

Through an unexpected series of events I find myself going to Open Repositories 2008

http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

The lineup looks great including a keynote from Peter Murray-Rust, and two (!) sessions on Scientific Repositories.

There is also a Repository Challenge for developers with a £2,500 prize, which is like a million US dollars now (finally, Canadians get to make US dollar jokes).  Kudos to David Flanders for leading this "let's just build stuff and see what works" approach.

I will be blogging under tag/category or08, and twittering under hashtag #or08

I made an Upcoming event, mainly because then if you add the machine tag

upcoming:event=455039

to your Flickr photos, it will automatically put in a nice "Taken at Open Repositories 2008" logo.

Semantically-enriched search results coming from Yahoo

In an upcoming talk I will be continuing a theme I started at Allen Press, calling for more semantic enrichment of scientific information online (I am of course, only one of many making such calls).

It is therefore timely to see Yahoo offering an open platform for harvesting and returning semantically-enhanced search.

There was a pre-announcement on TechCrunch, followed by the official word on the Yahoo Search Blog

In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Yahoo Search Blog - The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem - March 13, 2008

You can sign up for more information at

http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/open.html

So what would an appropriate set of semantic information be for a scientific article, what would your ideal search display include?  # of citations?  Impact Factor?  Chemical and gene sequences?  Price?  (Sometimes information wants to be expensive...)  How much can we fit into a couple of lines that will help to select one article over another in results?

UPDATE: And Yahoo is just one player in this space, as Paul Miller indicates in his posting Looking for a dominant Semantic Web search engine.

via Twitter mostly

Science Policies and Science Portals - registration open

Registration is now open for

IFLA 2008 Satellite meeting
Science Policies and Science Portals

Canada, Montreal, Polytechnique Montreal - Friday August 8th 2008

I also made an Upcoming.org event.

I've proposed a tag: ifla2008science

transcript - Senate Committee on S&T Strategy

The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology (of Canada) met on January 30 and 31, 2008 to consider the federal government’s new Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy — Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage.  The full transcript is now online.  The heads of NSERC, CFI, CIHR, NRC, and Industry all spoke, amongst others.

39th Parliament, 2nd Session
(October 16, 2007 -   )
Committee Proceedings

• January 31, 2008
• January 30, 2008

The proceedings were aired on CPAC but I wasn't able to find any online video of them.

Previously:
May 21, 2007  PM Harper announces Canadian Science and Technology Strategy

the Nature of Canadian science

In an editorial today, Nature expressed concerns about the position of science and science advice within the Canadian government

When the Canadian government announced earlier this year that it was closing the office of the national science adviser, few in the country's science community were surprised. Science has long faced an uphill battle for recognition in Canada, but the slope became steeper when the Conservative government was elected in 2006.

The decision in 2004 by the then prime minister Paul Martin to appoint a scientist for independent, non-partisan advice on science and technology was a good one — in principle. Arthur Carty, the chemist who secured the position, duly relinquished his post as president of the National Research Council Canada, which he had revitalized.

But his new office was destined to fail. The budget was abysmal and the mandate was vague at best. After winning power from the Liberals, the Conservatives moved Carty's office away from the prime minister's offices to Industry Canada. In 2007, the government formed the 18-member Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC). ... It can be expected to be markedly less independent: although it is stocked with first-class scientists and entrepreneurs, several government administrators also hold seats.

Concerns can only be enhanced by the government's manifest disregard for science.

Nature 451, 866 (21 February 2008) "Science in retreat" | doi:10.1038/451866a | Published online 20 February 2008 - Full Text - PDF

First published in 1869, Nature is a prominent international journal of peer-reviewed science.  According to Journal Citation Reports information available at in-cites.com, Nature was the second most-cited scientific journal worldwide in 2006.

UPDATE 2008-02-22: Reported today in the Globe and Mail

In a strongly worded editorial, entitled Science in Retreat and published in yesterday's issue, the British journal Nature wrote that while Canada's researchers consistently rank among the world's finest, the same cannot be said for the federal government's position on science and research.

...

In a rebuttal letter to Nature, Industry Minister Jim Prentice writes that the government is committed to "supporting world-leading research."

UPDATE: Also in the February 22, 2008 Ottawa Citizen

Under the headline "Science in Retreat," an editorial in yesterday's issue of the British journal Nature says Canada's Conservative government has a "dismal" track record on science and the environment.

The government issued a pointed rebuttal late yesterday afternoon, saying some of the criticisms are "completely misleading," while one is "incomprehensible."

...

It "has expressed what many of us feel," says geologist Andrew Miall, of the University of Toronto, and president of the Royal Society of Canada's Academy of Science.

The academy has not taken an official position, but Mr. Miall said via e-mail that he and his colleagues, as individual scientists, are "very concerned" about the dismantling of science advisory bodies and dismissal of senior independent advisers -- most notably Canada's national science adviser, chemist Arthur Carty, the former president of the National Research Council.

...

"How anyone can state that 18 bright minds [on STIC] cannot perform the task of one science adviser -- who decided to retire after years of dedicated public service -- is incomprehensible," Industry Minister Jim Prentice says in the rebuttal [to the Nature editorial] provided to Canwest News Service.

Disclaimer: I'm just the messenger.  Any statements quoted from the Nature article above, or indeed any statements I quote from any article, represent the opinions and research of the original authors alone, and don't necessarily reflect my opinion.  When it comes to anything to do with the Canadian government, this blog has no official opinions of any kind whatsoever.

Canadian health records going online

Ontario's Privacy Commissioner even keeps her electronic health record, called MyChart, on a memory stick, a device the size of a pack of gum that neatly tucks into a pants pocket.

"Given that I travel extensively, it's very important to have access to my [medical] records at a moment's notice," said Ann Cavoukian, who has undergone neurosurgery three times.

Although MyChart is available only to patients at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, other Canadian hospitals are coming out with their own versions of the paperless health record.

"By 2010, the goal is to have half of the population with an electronic health record," said Richard Alvarez, president and chief executive officer of Canada Health Infoway, an independent, federally funded agency that works with provinces and territories to invest in electronic health-record projects, typically by funding half the cost. By 2016, he wants every Canadian to have one.

Globe and Mail - Your medical chart, just a mouse click away - February 18, 2008

Canadian Canada Health Infoway has been like the multibillion dollar project no one has ever heard of, but they seem to be slowly raising their profile of late.  Their entire site is was down (well, unreachable from my computer anyway) at the moment when I tried to access it this morning (hopefully not a harbinger of things to come), but you can of course read the brief info on Wikipedia.

UPDATE: I can reach the site now.  There's also lots of info at

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/partners/free/infoway/

an end to health care waiting - CIHR Café Scientifique

I thought Café Scientifique was just a clever name from CIHR (we do this sometimes in the Federal Government to get around bilingualism issues) but it turns out it is a Movement.

Wikipedia comes through with the info as usual: Café Scientifique

CIHR has held and will hold events across Canada, the next one is

All I ever do is wait! Putting an end to health care wait times

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008, 6 p.m.
Mercury Lounge
56 Byward, Ottawa
Please RSVP: cafescientifique@cihr-irsc.gc.ca

Also LIVE on the Web at www.webcastcanada.ca/cihr-irsc

CIHR - Café scientifique - or in French, err... Cafés scientifiques des IRSC

Science Friday in Second Life

From

to

thanks to Ira Flatow doing Science Friday on the radio and in Second Life.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/

the SL audio stream maxed out, I'm listening on http://wkms.org/listen/

The topic is [US] Federal Government and Science.

UPDATE: If you missed it, they have an audio podcast as well as video and other features.

Ingenta - Publishing Technology Trends

In December 2007, Ingenta held the first event in their new Publishing Technology Trends seminar series.
Topics:

• "Authoritative? What's that? And who says?"
  Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer, Ingenta
• "Beyond articles"
  Toby Green, Head of Publishing, OECD
• "Adding value to visitors"
  Paul Goad, Managing Director, TACODA
• "Keeping pace with online challenges"
  Randy Petway, VP, Publishing Technology
• "Key issues in the development of publishing"
  David Worlock, Chief Research Fellow, Outsell

See their posting (part of their eye to eye February 2008 newsletter) for more information and links to the presentations.

whither the generalist library in a world of domain specialists?

Peter Murray-Rust blogging about the Academic Publishing in Europe conference (APE 2008)

Panel Discussion: What Matters? The Future Role of Libraries in Science and Society? Swallowed by OA Repositories, turned into University Presses or kept as Book Museums?

Here I have a problem. I appreciate that libraries have many roles and I’m a keen supporter. Guardianship of scholarship, preservation, access, etc. But this doesn’t come across in science. I see librarians because I’m working on information-rich projects but if I didn’t I wouldn’t. How many PhD chemistry students will come to the library. (We have a lovely library in our building, funded by Unilever, and students like working there because it’s quiet. But we wouldn’t build the same facility today. And Henry tells me that Imperial has closed its departmental library. They have a nice quiet work area - with terminals - but it’s not a library.  Librarians cannot make a new role out of being super-purchasing and contract officers for information - scientists neither see nor care. So I challenged the panel with this and similar points.

Science and technology move so fast that none of us can keep up. Subject librarians trained on the classical model cannot provide what scientists need. The bioscientists look to PubMed, EBI, PDB, etc as the repositories of knowledge - not to their institutions. What they need are information scientists embedded in their laboratories. People who know how to hack perl, python, Java, XML, RDF, RSS, etc. Where the flow of meta-information is from the scientist to the information scientists as well as the other way round. It’s a tall order. But the average 18-year old does not look in a library for scientific information - they look to Google and Wikipedia (which is why I contribute when I can find time).

Thes views are reinforced by what the biscoientists and physicists are doing. They create domain repositories. They either have large national or international organisations which are beneficient and wish to oversee the free movement of scientific infomation. With bio- it’s Pubmed and Pubchem, NCBI, PDB, EBI, etc. and with physics it’s arXiv and SCOAP3. These are domain repositories and that’s what we critically need.

I can see that certain primary research will naturally go to IRs - mandated fulltext, theses, etc. But  many will see Pubmed and SCOAP3 as the primary places, not their institution.

I guess underlying this is an element of social networking that the Internet exposes: allegience to local institutions is an artefact of physical proximity.  When physical interaction is a real part of your community, this is not a problem - the local public library remains a real meeting place.  The university library acts as a neutral meeting ground and study area.  But we find in the online environment, people tend to coalesce around their interests, not their locations.  When you go online, do you go to your city or neighbourhood web network (if such a thing even exists?) or do you instead go to sites around your personal network and interests: your Facebook friends, a digital photography site, your Warcraft Guild page and Guild Bank, your aggregator with blogs that interest you.

I never really quite got this school spirit thing of "our" team versus "their" team.  You may find that scientists consider their peers in their discipline as the group to which they owe their loyalty, not their institution.  That means their content and their efforts are going to flow to the online representations of their scientific network, whether that's domain repositories, conference sites, or specialised scientific discussion groups.

This is a challenge for the physical library, which brought together disparate groups on the basis of being the gatekeeper of physical content, and then built services (e.g. reference) for the crowds of people who flowed in.

One possible role is for the library to participate in the domain networks, as we see with the roles of NLM and British Library in PubMed Central and UKPMC.  And it's certainly a legitimate role to be the collector of the institution's output in an IR, as long as you recognize that the IR is just going to be one node in a much larger network of content that may be aggregated on a domain basis (e.g. one can imagine a chemistry portal that draws on PubChem, anything "chemistry tagged" across any IRs it can search, and other chem resources).

SciBarCamp in Toronto - March 2008

SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a weekend of talks and discussions.  It will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on the weekend of March 15-16 [2008], with an opening reception on the evening of March 14 [2008].  The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture.  The themes are:

• The edge of science (eg, synthetic biology, quantum gravity, cognitive science)
• The edge of technology (eg, mobile web, ambient computing, nanotechnology, web 2.0)
• Science 2.0 (open access, changing models of publication and collaboration, scientific software)
• Scientific literacy and public engagement (eg, one laptop per child project, policy and science, technology as legislation, enfranchising the poor, the young, the old)
• The interactions of science, art and culture:  Scientists and artists as partners in the continuing evolution of the culture.

http://scibarcamp.org/

I had the privilege and the pleasure of attending last year's Nature-O'Reilly-Google SciFoo, and I found a lot to like about the unconference experience.  It's nice to see a science unconference closer to home.

via A Blog Around The Clock

IFLA 2008 satellite conferences for science and medical libraries

IFLA 2008 will be in Quebec City this year, but I have discovered there are quite a few associated satellite meetings in different venues.  I don't know if I will go to IFLA proper, but I plan to attend the science portals preconference in Montreal.  Here are a few of the events that are relevant to science libraries:

Disappearing disciplinary borders in the social science library - global studies or sea change?
Dates: 6-7 August 2008
Location: University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Contact person: Lynne M. Rudasill <mailto:rudasill@uiuc.edu> 
Website: http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/ssls/

National Science Policies and Science Portals
Dates: 8 August 2008
Location: Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal (Montreal)
Contact person: Irma Pasanen <mailto:irma.pasanen@tkk.fi> 
Website: http://lib.tkk.fi/ifla/IFLA_Science_Portals

The role of evidence based research in medical libraries
Dates: 9 August 2008
Location: Québec City (exact location to be advised)
Contact person: H. Todd <mailto:h.todd@library.uq.edu.au> 
Website: to be announced

Rethinking Access to Information: Evolving perspectives on information content and delivery
Dates: 6-7 August 2008 (arrival and social event of 5 August)
Location: Boston Public Library, Boston, MA (USA)
Contact person: Poul Erlandsen <mailto:poer@dpu.dk> 
Website: website with link from IFLA website

ICSTI video - "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information"

Videos of the presentations from the ICSTI 2007 Public Conference "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information" are now available.

You can see the programme with links to presentations, and the video page is separate, with links to each topic (RealVideo format - click on the camcorder icons on each sub-page, not on the presentation titles), I was in Quality, certification and peer review - Part 1, my presentation was Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone (RealVideo, 35 minutes).  I encourage you to check out the other topics, I found there were some really informative presentations.

(As I said in my previous posting about my presentation, the title is not great, it's more like "categorizing the problem space of journal article exploration, and what new features or metrics we might use in this new space, as well as what new scholarly objects we might certify by applying peer review".)

My hair is, as usual, sticking out at some odd angle.  Fortunately for you, most of the time the video shows the slide I'm talking about. It's probably not entirely clear from the video, but about 14 minutes in the projector died, so I was left talking beside a blank screen (I could still see the slides on my own monitor) for about 5 minutes until everyone decided they'd had enough of that and we took a break and came back when the projector was fixed.

The next (closed, members-only) ICSTI meeting is coming up next week in Paris.  I don't know whether there is an accompanying public workshop.

UPDATE: The first version of this post ended up with an amusingly unfortunate URL.

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

ResearchBlogging.org

http://researchblogging.org/ is an aggregator that picks up posts (from registered blogs) that have BPR3 tagging to indicate it is a post about peer-reviewed research

via Bora

I think this is a great step in promoting peer-reviewed research on the web.

Previously:
August 09, 2007  the peer review logo

edit Science 2.0 at Scientific American

Widely reported, but anyway

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it's my feature story on "Science 2.0," which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0

You can add your thoughts at: Scientific American - Edit This - Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? - January 9, 2008

It has some interesting discussion on the reputation issue

"The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion," says PLoS ONE's Surridge. "Scientists don't blog because they get no credit."

The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. (That group's parent company, Macmillan, also owns Scientific American.) Once again, however, the technology itself may help. "Nobody believes that a scientist's only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes," Hannay says. "People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It's just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too."

The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. ...

Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. "Our real mission isn't to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication," he says. ...

Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. "It's a Darwinian process," he says. "About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread."

Here's what I left as a comment:

As I wrote in a recent blog posting, in the online world one has to think about both reputation and attention.  In the traditional print journal world, the only way to get attention was by first gaining reputation through publication.  In the online world, I would argue particularly for young scientists, the amount of attention they can get (from search hits, incoming links, and others reading their blog postings and wiki entries) can be invaluable in finding collaborators, and in building an "online reputation".  This means there is a challenging balancing act between waiting to gain reputation through traditional journal articles, versus taking a risk and being more open, and gaining both attention and reputation through the digital medium.  In my experience (as a non-scientist), the opportunities opened up by blogging have been much greater than I could ever have imagined, and the responses are more rapid and more numerous than I get when I publish in a journal.

Preston Manning on federal science policy in Canada

Preston Manning shot some pretty forceful bullet points at the state of science policy in Canada.
Globe and Mail - Just how did we let this happen? - December 17, 2007
The article is unfortunately not available in full online, so here's a sampling:

Why is the construction of new [medical isotope] reactors, slated to replace the 50-year-old NRU reactor, 10 years behind schedule and way over budget? Why does no one appear to have warned federal politicians about this looming crisis until it was too late?

   As a former federal politician with an interest in science policy, let me suggest some answers:

   * because this country has no federal science department or ministry dedicated exclusively to the development and management of publicly funded science and technology or to the proper allocation of the federal government's multibillion-dollar science, technology and innovation budget. Industry Canada, as well as Parliament's standing committee on industry, science, and technology have a vast array of responsibilities, of which oversight for science policies and agencies is only one, and these responsibilities do not include oversight of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL);

   * because in this country you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of members of Parliament and provincial legislators with scientific or engineering training sufficient to enable them to ask relevant scientific questions in Question Period or in committee;

   * because our Parliament has no "Scientist-General" (an officer of Parliament like the Auditor-General) or "Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology" (as in Great Britain) to provide members with access to needed scientific expertise, including that required to adjudicate between conflicting scientific opinions;

   * because this country has yet to figure out a funding formula for publicly funded science projects that insures long-term viability.

   * because we, the Canadian public, often fail to appreciate the critical role that science and technology play in undergirding our economy and ensuring our quality of life, and therefore do not insist on a higher level of scientific literacy and competence from our media, legislators, or political leaders.

It is interesting that Mr. Manning didn't mention either the National Science Advisor or the Council of Canadian Academies, or the newly struck advisory committee whose name I can never remember... ah yes, the STIC - Science, Technology and Innovation Council.  I guess his focus is more on advice to all of Parliament, whereas the current structures tend to be more for advising the sitting government only.

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who actually has attempted to unravel this byzantine advisory structure.

There has been a ridiculously long chain of advisory groups, including the Science Council of Canada and the Council of Science and Technology Advisors.  I'm not sure exactly what is accomplished by repeatedly dissolving and reinventing these groups.

Previously:
February 21, 2006  help me understand the Canadian national science advisory structure

ROM unearths dinosaur... in their own collection

Or: "One small sentence for John McIntosh, one giant dinosaur for the Royal Ontario Museum".

"This is a fascinating and somewhat humorous story, and one the Museum is extremely pleased to tell,” said the ROM’s Director and CEO William Thorsell.

Dr. David Evans, new Associate Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the ROM’s Department of Natural History, found the ultimate “skeleton in the closet.” Arriving in May 2007 to head up the ROM’s dinosaur research program, one of his first jobs was to find a sauropod dinosaur for display in the new Age of Dinosaurs gallery. The ROM’s new gallery already included excellent specimens of three of the four most recognizable dinosaur types – T.Rex, Triceratops, and Stegasaurus – but none of the largest dinosaurs, the sauropods.

After spending months investigating options, including purchasing a cast or even digging one up, Evans found what he was looking for in an unexpected place. While on a related trip to Wyoming, he was reading an article by famed sauropod expert Jack McIntosh when something caught his eye -- a reference to a Barosaurus skeleton at the ROM. The ROM’s databases turned up a blank, but after connecting the disparate dinosaur dots Evans was able to show that what were thought to be isolated bones scattered throughout the collections room actually belonged to a single dinosaur.

ROM News Releases - Massive Barosaurus skeleton discovered at the ROM

CTV Newsnet has a good video (which is either not available or not free) where Dr. Evans says it was a 2005 article by McIntosh that said the skeleton was transferred from the Carnegie Museum to the ROM.  I did some searching and I turned up a single 2005 book chapter "The Genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae)", which is searchable on Amazon, the book is Thunder-lizards: The Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs (ISBN-13: 978-0253345424) and on page 42 it says

"These elongate cervicals (CM 1198) probably belong to a partial skeleton, field #155 (now ROM 3670), which was originally identified as Diplodocus."

Here's a direct link to Amazon book search for page 40, which shows the ROM abbreviation (I couldn't quite figure out how to get it to go to page 42, but you can scroll there).  The book is also on Google Book Search, but page 42 is a forbidden page there.

The dinosaur is named "Gordo".

ELPUB 2008 in Toronto June 25-27: Open Scholarship

The CFP for ELPUB 2008 is out.

Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB 2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences , and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications.

deadline is January 20, 2008