I have been thinking about e-science and it seems to me there are two separate but complementary threads. There is the technology thread that leads us through grid computing and massive storage to the research cyberinfrastructure, I'm not sure how much of a library role there is in this, it's mostly technical. There is an intersection maybe at advanced repositories.
But there's also another thread, of open access, open data, and open (or more open) discourse, that's maybe taking us to something called open science. This is very much in line with the library role of providing public access to a wide range of written works, and promoting an informed debate about ideas.
Lorcan has some good pointers on the more technical side of things, in his posting Some e-science resources.
On the open science side, I find iCommons.org - Rio Framework for Open Science
In the weeks preceding the iCommons Summit, it was clear to Heather Ford and John Wilbanks that the event could play a role in connecting open science and free culture. The two respective Executive Directors of iCommons and Science Commons agreed that the meeting in Rio should serve as a means for initiating discussion, in the hopes of discovering a way to bridge the divide. The result - the Rio Framework for Open Science.
“It was clear that members of the free culture movement weren’t connected enough to the open science movement,” said John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons and co-creator of the draft framework, “Things I knew at [Science Commons] weren’t filtering to Creative Commons and vice versa. There were people at [Creative Commons International] who knew licenses but not technology.”
Serving as a link farm, Open Science is the first substantive outcome of the Summit, delivered less than two months after it was conceptualized. Developed and tailored by Ford and Wilbanks, the first draft of the Framework was released on August 19. It is maintained on the iCommons wiki.
Right now, Open Science is a skeleton - a home for a minimal set of tools for universities and institutions, with the potential and hope that it expands exponentially as more users utilize the resources. By having the infrastructure live on a wiki, community members are able to actively edit, comment, annotate and add to the existing base.
via Open Access News - More on the Rio Framework for Open Science
What might some foundational components of Open Science be? Well, there's the idea of open discourse, which Andrew I. Dayton characterizes as opening up scientific discussion to wider participation
Even Open Access leaves a vast inequality in scientific discourse. If you can’t afford to attend the latest scientific meetings (say, for instance, you work for the US government) or are not a member of a prestigious institution, you can be frozen out of cutting edge scientific discussions. You can neither query the major players nor contribute to the debates, unless your prestige or the media value of the subject matter is such to garner you a published letter to the editor.
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JournalReview.org is not the sole source for Open Discourse. Retrovirology (4) and other BioMed Central journals (5) already provide a specific tool for all interested participants to submit comments (without anonymity, though) about a published work using the “Post a Comment” function...
A site similar to JournalReview.org, BioWizard (6), hosts commentaries, but only on articles reached by searching through PubMed (7), and requires posters to at least identify their institutions and cities. PLoS ONE (8) plans to offer commentary on its publications, once it is launched. Even the dowager empress of biological journals, Cell (9), has ventured a cautious toe to the tide, inviting public commentary on selectively “featured” articles. The concept, it seems, is coming of age.
Anyone who can work the phrase "dowager empress" into a scientific article gets my attention.
Beyond open access: open discourse, the next great equalizer
Andrew I. Dayton
Retrovirology 2006, 3:55 doi:10.1186/1742-4690-3-55
Published 30 August 2006
text from Provisional PDF
(Note: Mac OS X Preview didn't seem to like the PDF very much, but it was fine in Acrobat.)
via Open Access News - Open review, open commentary, open debate
Peter Murray-Rust addresses various aspects of open, including open data, in Is Openness “ethically flawed”?
Data. I believe that scientific data belongs to the commons, not to publishers or secondary aggregators which is why I supported the continuation of PubChem last year in its struggle against Chemica Abstracts.
...
Apart from the “full-text” the act of scientific publishing is extremely destructive of the scientific record. We have much anecdotal evidence that most scientific data (80+%) supporting primary publications are lost for ever. Many publishers do not support supplemental (factual) data and those that do, do not support its capture in semantic form (PDFs destroy information very effectively). True, we are exploring with several publishers how to tackle this, but they can currently make no strong ethical claims for current practice.
via Open Access News - A new blog on open access and open data
I think there is a strong case to be made that libraries have an opportunity to be at the forefront of an open science movement, combining all of the elements discussed above.
I have been advocating enhanced scientific discussion and discovery tools for some time.
Previously:
August 03, 2006 my review of The Long Tail
June 21, 2006 my article on peer review for Nature
December 02, 2005 Nature: free your data, blog about your science, and use Web Services
Great article - I found it very interesting.
I have actually been a member of JournalReview.org before the Dayton article - and it truly does provide a venue for "Open Science". I am glad it is getting some attention, as it provides a great resource.
"Open Science" is a wonderful term coined here that I look forward to using with my colleagues.
Thank you
Posted by: John G Oglerom | September 06, 2006 at 10:16 PM
Thanks but I didn't coin the term, it has been out there for a while, see e.g. Willinsky's article in First Monday Volume 10, Number 8 — 1 August 2005: The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science.
Posted by: Richard Akerman | September 08, 2006 at 06:42 AM