Programme

How the web is changing science: A reader and author's perspective

"Rebooting" (aka the future of) science journalism

With many of journalism‟s institutions, traditions, and practices under fire, science journalists face a tough evolutionary challenge: How should we adapt if we‟re to take engaging, rigorous science writing into this changing environment? What traits and behaviours should we cultivate or keep, and which leave behind? What pressures and opportunities do new media forms and standards create, and how should we respond to them? How do we ensure accuracy and transparency while engaging readers? Finally, how can people who want to write well about science do all this ... and make a living? Can we be the same old animals, or must we take new forms?

Format Panel 2.0 style: After some brief framing remarks by the moderator, each panelist will speak for 5 to 8 minutes. Halfway through the session, we‟ll open it to what we expect to be a very lively give-and-take discussion.

Publishing primary research data

Part 1: How can National Libraries support data sharing, citation, and (re)use? (Adam Farquhar)

Researchers, funders, publishers, data centres, and libraries now clearly recognize the need to support data sharing, citation, and (re)use. There is a growing sense of urgency as our scholarly communications infrastructure flexes to meet new ways of doing science. But action must take place across disciplines at a national and international scale to be effective.

The British Library is developing a strategic approach to supporting researchers who work with data. We‟ll discuss this strategy and how we are working together internationally through DataCite to provide new services that enable citation, encourage data sharing, and provide incentives to researchers.

Part 2: Exploring the role of journals, editors, and publishers in data sharing (Iain Hrynaszkiewicz)

Scientific data sharing has moved beyond the question of "why?", and on to the "what?", "where?" "how?" and "when?". Online journal publishing presents opportunities to publish raw data as supplementary material, and to link data deposited outside the journal to published articles. But how should we define a dataset in relation to an article, how should the two be linked, and in what format(s) should the data be made available?

Human subjects data present unique challenges of privacy and consent, especially when considering the release of historical data. Best practice for publishing human subjects data will be discussed along with alternatives to fully open access publication.

Furthermore, myriad domain-specific data standards are emerging, to enable machine readability, and there are calls for ownership of, and rights within, data to be waived, to ensure interoperability. To what extent should journals, editors and publishers be encouraging – or enforcing – data deposition, specific data standards, data formats and license agreements?

Participants are encouraged to share the perspective of their field(s) of scientific research in relation to these questions.

Part 3: Promoting an infrastructure and incentives to encourage datas haring: a JISC perspective (Simon Hodson)

The premise of the JISC Managing Research Data Programme is that it is a good thing to share data for verification and reuse. This premise is becoming less and less contentious and numerous examples can be cited for the benefits of more open approaches to sharing research data. A vision can be presented in which data management infrastructure, planning tools, institutional and national support combine to achieve this promise. Also necessary, however, are greater credit and attribution for the sharing of research data. This presentation will describe activities being taken forward by the JISCMRD Programme to put in place a supporting infrastructure and to encourage greater recognition for researchers who publish and share data. The initiatives include projects exploring means of citing complex data and analysis, as well as projects to put sharing data at the centre of publication. Initiatives in other countries will also be considered and in this context a number of open questions remain. Participants will be asked to contribute to a discussion of these and other questions:
What publication models will best contribute to greater levels of data sharing?
What relationships between researchers, data repositories and publications need to be established and what needs to be done to ensure they are sustainable?
Where are research data best curated for the long term, in institutional repositories or discipline specific data archives?

Students in the sandbox - developing professionals

Science education remains largely stuck in a didactic mode, where information is transmitted from qualified professionals to aspiring students. Ironically, because social tool adoption by practicing scientists has been slow, many people involved in delivering science education are visitors rather than residents in social spaces, and their expertise with these tools is outstripped by the students they teach. This session will start with a whistle-stop tour of the pedagogies of online education. Participants will then discuss the barriers to tool adoption, examples of best practice, and suggestions for institutional and individual advances.

Science writing and the law after BCA v Singh

This talk will set out the current legal landscape for science writies and blogging. It follows on from a talk given by Green at Science Online London 2009, with updates on the famous case of the British Chiropractic Association v Simon Singh.

From Galaxy Zoo to Zooniverse

The Zooniverse is a growing collection of online citizen science projects, which allow users to collaborate and contribute to real scientific research. The galaxies, the Moon and our nearest star, the Sun, are all being inspected and classified by an army of more than 300,000 members of the public. Future targets include not only astronomy, but also topics such as papyrology, climatology and even botany.

I'm a scientist, Get me out of Here

I'm a Scientist is an innovative education programme that uses the internet to get school students talking to real live scientists. The June 2010 event was the biggest ever with 5,000 students interacting with 100 scientists. It's funded by a Society Award from the Wellcome Trust. Find out what works in the event, with live demos so you can really see how it feels to take part. We'll discuss what it is about doing it online that makes the event possible, and why, and how the things we‟ve learned could be applied to other settings.

The health conversation on the social web: laboratory or echo chamber?

A number of regular health conversations take place on Twitter under hashtags such as #hcsm #socpharm #RNchat and #hcsmeu which have been effective in connecting early adopters of social technologies who have an interest in the discussing health on the social web. However, is their utility plateauing? Are they managing to recruit sufficient members from all of the key stakeholder communities in the health conversation (patients, carers, healthcare professionals, providers, industry, policy makers) to merit the claim that they are truly inclusive? Are they talking to themselves, or making a substantive impact on the future of health communications? What else could they be doing?
Background viewing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXPJVwwEmiM

Recommendation tools for scientists

Part 1: From search to discovery: automated recommendation of scholarly papers on citeulike (Kevin Emamy)

Could scientist's personal paper collections be mined as a resource for others in their field? Citeulike has been running a collaborative-filter based scholarly paper recommendation system on the web for nearly a year. The system is blind to the contents of the papers it recommends and relies on the actions of the site's users to produce it's results. As a live system, it provides a unique opportunity to quantify the effectiveness of different approaches.

This talk describes the genesis of the system, the types of filters used, results so far and plans for future approaches.

Part 2: The role of tools in influencing behavior and policy (Jason Hoyt)

Many would argue that Open Access & Open Science is the ideal, but is it acceptable to build search and recommendation engines that promote this ideal? Should they instead remain agnostic, i.e. deliver based solely on the content? Open discussion to follow.

Connecting Scientific Resources

Do you have data? Have you decided that you want to publish that data in a friendly way? Then this session is for you. Allowing your data to be linked to other data sets is an obvious way to make your data more useful, and to contribute back to the data community that you are a part of, but the mechanics of how you do that is not always so clear cut. This session will discuss just that. With experts from the publishing world, the liked data community, and scientific data services, this is a unique opportunity to get an insight into how to create linked scientific data, and what you can do with it once you have created it.

The state of science blogging?

This conference has its roots in science blogging. The first Science Online London conference, in 2008, was devoted entirely to the medium. The panel will explore how science blogging has evolved over the years, what forms are currently most interesting, the pros and cons of blogging on your own versus blogging as part of a network, and the future for science blogging.

Who are you? The little details to remember when gathering information about the people behind the screens

The Web offers an unprecedented opportunity for social scientists to gather actual behavioural data about research participants, providing insight into and evidence for theory and practice; however, the computer-mediated medium also introduces practicalities that need to be considered when development studies. Ethical, methodological and design issues are implicated by the constraints of the so-called “lean” medium, as are the identity and influence processes that research questions seek to study.

What unique social information must we be cognizant of when seeking to understand online behaviour, and what is the real potential of the Web for social science?

Turning online science into real world policy change

Evidence-based policy is a phrase more abused than adhered in many areas of life. The internet, the growth of science blogs and forums, the advent of twitter and facebook and the emergence of a skeptic movement have to certain extent flattered to deceive in terms of their influence on politicians and policy-makers. While big business, other grassroots causes and the promulgators of pseudoscience have been more successful in achieving or opposing favourable policy change. It is time for the science and skeptic community, both at large and on-line, to get serous about translating both published work and critical analysis into political change. I have some suggestions how.

The Sci Vote movement

Part 1: A hashtag isn't a campaign (?): On the tribes of online campaigning (Alice Bell)

It is often said that social media campaigns amount to little more than ranting in an echo-chamber; users sit in little self-constructed bubbles of agreement. Although this is a fair criticism, I want to start by arguing against such pessimism, to defend the role of niche movements and the possibilities provided by new media for developing them. Precisely because #scivote was a hashtag, it had a power to connect. It allowed nascent on and off-line political mumblings to feel less isolated, it connected people to events, information, ideas, debates and, quite simply, more people. It let individuals develop knowledge and interest and fostered community. I conclude however, by arguing that the science lobby must broaden their scope. Too much Sci Vote activity of the pre-election period, including that in mainstream press, was characterised by tribalism. Identifying “science friendly” MPs or labeling policy as “anti science” is a simplistic game of goodies and baddies which belies the subtitles of science in British society. To be taken seriously in policy and broader public discourse, the science lobby must accommodate a diversity of interests, actors and ideas and demonstrate how specific areas of expertise are meaningful to a range of issues. The scivote hashtag had its moment, now it‟s time to drop the science brand and go to work on a range of differently local levels.

Part 2: Science Vote; what's the goal? (Imran Khan)

The Science Vote" was a campaign kicked off by CaSE that then grew organically. The online campaign was a part of it; it included the twitter #scivote hashtag, and the Science Vote and S Word blogs. The goal of the entire campaign was to get the three main parties to take science seriously as an election issue so that they would strengthen their science manifestos and commitments. Was the online aspect of the campaign useful in doing that? Did it add value? How can the community express itself better next time around? What do you want the campaign to be?

Data visualisation

The use of infographics, data visualisations and information design is a rising trend across many disciplines: science, design, journalism and web. At the same time, daily exposure to the web is creating a incredibly design-literate population. Could this be a new language?

The Green Chain Reaction

Science Online 2010 provides an opportunity for you to join an experiment - The Green Chain Reaction - involving people, machines, chemistry and – of course – the internet. GCR is open to anyone who is interested and you don‟t need to be a chemist to take part. The experiment is assessing the feasibility of extracting meaning from chemical reaction information and data online to create new knowledge from sources that would otherwise remain "dark" (mainly patents). The focus is on determining the "greeness" of chemical reactions in manufacturing and research, with an aim to increasing their acceptability. The results from this experiment will be explored and displayed with stunning new technology in this breakout session.

Take part in the Green Chain Reaction here scienceonlinelondon.wikidot.com/greenchem:how-can-i-get-involved.

ORCID as unique author identifier: what is it good for and should we worry or be happy?

The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative aims to create a central registry of unique identifiers for researchers. In this session we want to present and discuss two scenarios that would greatly benefit from a widely adopted unique author identifier: a) submission of a manuscript to a scientific journal and b) deposition of primary research data in a repository. We hope to have a lively discussion around the potential uses, but also dangers of the ORCID unique author identifier.

If you build it, will they come?

Part 1: Dragging my colleagues online (Bob O’Hara)

Bob O’Hara will discuss his attempts to get his colleagues to use online tools - Wikis, blogs, and even Google Wave - to coordinate their work. He will explain why there have been successes and failures, and why none of the failures could possibly have been his fault.

Part 2: Adoption and use Web 2.0 in novel forms of scholarly communications (Rob Procter)

I will summarise findings from our recent RIN-funded study of how UK researchers are responding to the opportunities provided by Web 2.0 to engage in novel forms of scholarly communications. I will examine patterns of adoption of Web 2.0 and discuss some of the factors that might explain why some researchers are reluctant to adopt. I will conclude by considering steps that different stakeholders might take to facilitate greater experimentation and uptake.

Part 3: Build it and they don’t come (Richard P. Grant)

The last few years have seen a failure of scientists to flock to social media sites. The ‘Facebook for scientists’ has never materialized; despite new sites springing up at the rate of about one a week in 2008 and 2009. Relatively few people have engaged with these ventures, and they are mainly the same few ‘early adopters’ who will try anything at least once. Failure to bridge the gap to the scientific community at large is often blamed on scientists being ‘too busy’ to engage in these efforts. But the true reason is much more fundamental: there is no value, real or perceived, to the vast majority of scientists.

Community needs a focus. A site for social networking alone does not offer anything scientists can’t get elsewhere. Successful ventures spring from identifying and then fulfilling a real need, and/or by offering something unique and valuable. The community aspect of these sites can then grow around the service. Examples from my own experience include the Science Advisory Board and Nature Network. I will also be experimenting with ‘community’ on the new F1000 website. What lessons can we learn from these experiences, and from the failed experiments?