User talk:OpenScientist/What would science look like if it were invented today

=Purpose of this page= This version of the page is a blog post-to-be for the June 2009 issue of the Euroscientist. It is the first part (focusing on knowledge creation) in a set of two posts dedicated to the future of science. Part II will focus on the structuring of knowledge, and you are warmly invited to join. For comments, please go here. Further textbits discarded during writing are here. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 10:18, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Part II: What would knowledge structuring look like if it were invented today?
Some of the points to consider (this is an evolving list of keyword and links to relevant concepts):
 * Data sharing
 * see also Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate


 * Data analysis
 * Ontologies
 * Data preservation
 * Impact measures
 * Science journalism
 * Science education
 * Encyclopedias
 * machine-readability
 * automated science
 * virtual realities

Related posts not cited in article yet

 * "If we invented the scholarly journal today, what would it look like?"
 * Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?
 * related: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable


 * Open Access and the A-Bomb
 * Evolutionary psychologist Irene Pepperberg at Edge.org about Hypothesis Testing
 * Science moves from the stacks to the Web; print too pricey
 * Popularity versus reliability in medical research
 * Help us write the Job Description – Sr Manager, Emerging Media Marketing
 * Don't format manuscripts
 * This revolution will be digitized: online tools for radical collaboration
 * How to choose a good scientific problem?
 * Experiments in science engagement – the exquisite corpse!
 * Open Science - seven recommendations
 * Memetracker
 * discussed, for example, here


 * Social networking site for researchers aims to make academic papers a thing of the past
 * discussed here


 * The ICE-man: Scholary HTML not PDF
 * Why isn't a printable version the supplement to the 'real' publication?
 * Humanities, Social Science Publishing: Costs More Than Science
 * How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network
 * What, exactly, is Open Science?
 * Deferential Geometry - This is a personal wiki notebook in theoretical physics.
 * Who is killing science on the Web? Publishers or Scientists?
 * A threat to scientific communication
 * Scholarly Communications must be Open
 * Crowd-sourcing product design
 * Story Time
 * Nature's Flawed Study of Wikipedia's Quality
 * Wikipedia’s Labor Squeeze and its Consequences
 * Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK: the model
 * see also A question of trust


 * Why Dave Munger’s passport fail made Science Online London better
 * LiquidPub
 * The Cathedral and the Bazaar
 * mention Fermat's side note
 * Query: Is there a technical or philosophical reason that you can't pass parameters or instructions along with a citation?
 * OmegaWiki
 * Open-process academic publishing
 * Publishing science on the web
 * "science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It's just a really, really inefficient one - the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate the existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one-to-three new assertions made in any one paper."


 * Nature special on data sharing
 * "Data management should be woven into every course in science."


 * The Open Scholar
 * Is Open Scholarship Too Risky for Young Scholars?
 * Wikipedia journal
 * “Peer review does not guarantee quality”
 * Growing significance of communities and collaboration in discovery and development
 * linked network of digital documents
 * Taylor and Francis first half results 2009: academic information revenue up 25%, and, are shareholders more interested in OA than T & F?
 * Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research
 * also bring in Kleiner's speech
 * mention that doing science funding in public would also reduce the possibility to game the system by exaggerating one's own contributions to science in grant applications


 * Microcredits for science?
 * Do you know of any examples of Open Notebook data being fetched automatically into a data repository on a regular basis?
 * ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Wiki technology has become a ubiquitous mechanism for dissemination of information, and places strong emphasis on collaboration. We aimed to leverage wiki technology to allow small groups of researchers to collaborate around a specific domain, for example a biological pathway. Automatically gathered seed data could be modified by the group and enriched with domain specific information. RESULTS: We describe a software system, BioKb, implemented as a plugin for the TWiki engine, and designed to facilitate construction of a field-specific wiki containing collaborative and automatically generated content. Features of this system include: query of publicly available resources such as KEGG, iHOP and MeSH, to generate 'seed' content for topics; simple definition of structure for topics of different types via an administration page; and interactive incorporation of relevant PubMed references. An exemplar is shown for the use of this system, in the the creation of the RAASWiki knowledgebase on the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS). RAASWiki has been seeded with data by use of BioKb, and will be the subject of ongoing development into an extensive knowledgebase on the RAAS. CONCLUSIONS: The BioKb system is available from http://www.bioinf.mvm.ed.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/BioKbPlugin as a plugin for the TWiki engine.


 * Rise of The Appendage
 * Article-Level Metrics Information at PLoS ONE
 * Post-Medium Publishing
 * a similar collaborative editing initiative, in the context of government 2.0
 * Terry Tao's speech on academia and mathematics of the future
 * quote: "One can draw an analogy between pre-internet academia and pre-industrial manufacturing. Before the industrial revolution, manufacturing was the province of individual craftsmen or of secretive guilds, working painstakingly on each individual piece of work, with each master passing down their carefully hoarded insights and tricks to just a handful of disciples.  It is not hard to find parallels to each of these phenomena in academia.

But after the industrial revolution, specialisation and mass production became the paradigm in manufacturing; less intimate, surely, but also vastly more efficient and reliable. One might bemoan the loss of creativity and individuality that each craftsman exhibited, but eventually, as the industrial revolution matured into the modern era, the outlets for creativity became dispersed to a wider group of people. Thanks to division of labour, design, invention, entrepreneurship, manufacturing, marketing, training, or management could now be performed by whoever was best qualified to do each, rather than by the same individual; and the best practices in each of these areas could be adopted widely, rather than being confined to their originator and a select number of followers.

Could it be that the internet will ignite the analogue of the industrial revolution for academia?"
 * ScribTeX
 * Shared maths lecturing
 * There is no single future for scientific journals

talk:talk:
Very interesting. If you make this discussion about part 2 its own page it will have its own talk page... I feel funny about leaving comments here :)  what about changes to the process of developing and assessing a hypothesis in the first place?  It's seems a bit of a historical quirk to me that the same group is expected to declare a hypothesis, define a methodology, carry out that methodology and assess errors, and evaluate the results / convert into a conclusion...  Lemuel Akins
 * Hi Lemuel, I hope it's fun to leave comments here, yet I fail to see why it should be funny (though I'm glad if it works out that way for you). The changes you mention were implicit in my text and covered in more detail by Michael Nielsen at Micropublication and open source research (listed in the above section), which I intend to incorporate more explicitly into the second part. Feel free to edit as you see fit! --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 10:24, 10 September 2009 (UTC)