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Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality:

What is being generated here is new science, and science isn’t paid for per se. The resources that generate science are supported by governments, charities, and industry but the actual production of science is not supported. The truly radical approach to this would be to turn the system on its head. Don’t fund the universities to do science, fund the journals to buy science; then the system would reward increased efficiency.

There is a problem at the core of this. For someone to pay for access to the results, there has to be a monetary benefit to them. This may be through increased efficiency of their research funding but that’s a rather vague benefit. For a serious charitable or commercial funder there has to be the potential to either make money, or at least see that the enterprise could become self sufficient. But surely this means monetizing the data somehow? Which would require restrictive licences, which is not at the end what we’re about.

The other story of the week has been the, in the end very useful, kerfuffle caused by ChemSpider moving to a CC-BY-SA licence, and the confusion that has been revealed regarding data, licencing, and the public domain. John Wilbanks, whose comments on the ChemSpider licence, sparked the discussion has written two posts [1, 2] which I found illuminating and have made things much clearer for me. His point is that data naturally belongs in the public domain and that the public domain and the freedom of the data itself needs to be protected from erosion, both legal, and conceptual that could be caused by our obsession with licences. What does this mean for making an effective data commons, and the Science Exchange that could arise from it, financially viable? Read more »

Posted: May 11th, 2008 under Collaboration, academic credit, data commons, data formats, funding, linking papers to open data, open access, open data, open-science-charter, osci-protocol, science21.
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Once again a range of conversations in different places have collided in my feed reader. Over on Nature Networks, Martin Fenner posted on Researcher ID which lead to a discussion about attribution and in particular Martin’s comment that there was a need to be able to link to comments and the necessity of timestamps. Then DrugMonkey posted a thoughtful blog about the issue of funding body staff introducing ideas from unsuccessful grant proposals they have handled to projects which they have a responsibility in guiding. Read more »

Posted: May 5th, 2008 under academic credit, citation, ethics, linking papers to open data.
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One thing that we have been thinking about a bit recently is how best to link elements of a peer reviewed paper back to an Open Notebook. There are a number of issues that this raises, both technical and philosophical about how and why we might do this. Our first motivation is to provide access to the raw data if people want it. The dream here is that by clicking on a graph you are taken straight through to processed data which you can then backtrack through to get to the raw data itself. This is clearly some way off.

Other simple solutions are to provide a hyperlink back to the open notebook, or to an index page that describes the experiment, how it was done, and how the data was processed. Publishers are always going to have an issue with this because they can’t rely on the stability of external material. So the other solution is to package up a version of the notebook and provide it as supplementary information. This could still provide links back to the ‘real’ notebook but provides additional stability and also protects the data against disaster by duplicating it.

The problem with this is that many journals will only accept pdf. While we can process a notebook to provide a package which is wrapped up as pdf this has a lot of limitations particularly when it comes to data scraping, which after all we want to encourage. An encouraging development was recently described on the BioMedCentral Blog where they describe the capability of uploading a ‘mini website’ as supplementary information. This is great as we can build a static version of our notebook, with lots of lovely rich metadata built in. We can point out to the original notebook and we can point in from the original notebook back to the paper. I am supposed to be working on a paper at the moment which I was considering where to send. I hope we can give BMC Biotechnology or perhaps BMC Research Notes a go to test this out.

Posted: February 6th, 2008 under linking papers to open data, open data, open notebook science.
Comments: 2