nodalpoint.org - science - Comments

Free access to NSNPAS in PubMedCentral?

Duncan — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 04:12:22 -0500

Nature, Science and OUP Bioinformatics are all absent from this NIH list of Journals That Submit Articles To PubMed Central, more details from alf on hublog.

Talking of PubMedCentral, if you haven't seen it already Building a GenBank of the Published Literature published in Science back in 2001 is an interesting read, along with the responses tracked in PubMed.

re: DOI for authors

gbilder — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:15:24 -0400

Just wanted to clarify that what the "board approved" was for CrossRef to go ahead an investigate creating a distributed contributor id service. They have not approved the launch of a service- yet. Having said that, this is something that everybody *really* wants and we are working quickly to get a prototype together. The service would look kind of like the current RePEc system, but would also include an OpenID component. Naturally, the other advantage it would have is that it would work across disciplines, etc. I expect we'll have more news by the end of the year.

--G

Unique Author Identification

Duncan — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:37:16 -0400

So, Geoffrey Bilder tells me that CrossRef are working on DOI for Authors, and have "board level approval" to go ahead with it. There is also some group working on DAI: Digital Author Identification, but their solution is not truly distributed. These solutions need to integrate with OpenID.

tipping point 2

PedroBeltrao — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 09:32:27 -0400

Thanks for the flattering words ;) but I would credit Timo Hannay and Chris Surridge for driving the change from the publishers side. Their initiatives (Nature Blogs, Nature Network, Connotea, PLoS ONE, etc) are the ones changing people's mind about web technologies. The blogs at ScienceBlogs and seed have also been very important.
About 2007, well I hope so, but it is really hard to predict. What we need now are examples of successful projects developed in the open. I am not ignoring pioneer projects like BioPerl but it would be great to have also discovery science. If open projects are really efficient then this would tip further the scales and drive more people to work this way.

About the Nodalpoint meeting and getting funds. Here in Europe, Marie Curie fellowships sometimes fund these events but it would need to be something bigger than just one conference. We could try to apply for a grant to develop Nodalpoint as an open science platform for bioinformatics. We could have a look at the grant application from OpenWetWare and see if would be feasible to do something similar.

Tipping points

Neil — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:55:27 -0400

2007 is the year, trust me...

Didn't we say that in 2001 ;)

No, I agree - things are moving quickly and in an agreeable direction. This can only accelerate as more young scientists come through (and more old scientists retire or die). In fact, I think it will soon be time to organise the inaugural "Nodalpoint Science 2.0 conference" - now, where to get some funding?

I would even risk a

Greg — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 06:03:21 -0400

would even risk a potential controversial idea. What if journal editors could use their blogs to post about interesting research questions ?

I think the correct Web 2.0/Science 2.0 terminology would be "disruptive idea" :)

Thank you for posting your experience at MSB on nodalpoint, I think that ultimately you'll be recognized as a pioneer in exploring the possibilities of web based publishing systems for science (aka weblogs). I'm interested to see if you agree, but my intuition tells me that we are currently witnessing a tipping point with respect to uptake of blogs/wikis/social networking etc. by working scientists as tools to improve the process of doing scientific research. 2007 is the year, trust me...

Personal views

Thomas — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:32:01 -0400

The suggestion of having research proposals in a blog is tempting. Could be delicate, given that editors have access to confidential information. Let's think about this one ;-)

As for the role of blogging for editors, it is true that editors can (or should) express their personal views in a blog. On the other hand, they inevitably represent the journal at the same time: again, the path to follow can be narrow...

In any case, happy that you liked your stay. It was a great pleasure having you around!
Thomas

Nature blogs

PedroBeltrao — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:39:43 -0400

I mostly read Nascent, Nautilus and Peer-to-Peer because they are great and closer to my interests (web tech and publishing) but I have seen that some of the Nature blogs have been covering conferences and starting interesting discussions. The discussion about social software in Methagora and the post on Nature Medicine 2.0 are good examples of this. One of the first blogs that Nature started had a bad habit of mostly posting links to the journals' papers but the new blogs are doing more interesting things now.

Added

alf — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:03:17 -0400

I've added The Seven Stones to http://planet.nature.com/

Do any of the other blogs listed there post the kind of thing you're talking about?

Nice idea

Neil — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:20:45 -0400

What if journal editors could use their blogs to post about interesting research questions

Well that would be great! They could tell us what they'd like to see in the journal. Or it would provide a forum to discuss research findings from published articles, spurring people on to do the next great experiment. I alluded to this in a recent blog post about open discussion of hypotheses.

Thanks for this interesting post.

One day science will grow

Greg — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 16:04:18 -0500

One day science will grow out of this. Researchers everywhere need to rise up and shout.

True. If we all keep on message, change will come slowly.

author IDs

Neil — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:47:12 -0500

Yeah, it's all about unique author IDs. When?

It's also about the nonsense that is the impact factor. We all know that there are many more measures of research impact than top-tier publications, but we keep living this lie. Why? Because it makes life easier for administrators - a nice, simple metric for their funding assessments. One day science will grow out of this. Researchers everywhere need to rise up and shout.

Perhaps this score should be the ratio of true positive/false positive, giving me a 1/8; it all depends how many initials you care to use ;)

Very nice.

Greg — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:20:33 -0500

Interesting to see the unique id for pubmed authors bug (feature?) cropping up again.

I'd have more to say, but I'm busy getting the upgrade working. Hopefully with facilities for posting images with stories as a built in features...

Nice one

Animesh — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 03:46:57 -0500

As I was reading through, I realized that we face it everyday. To be established in the field we do need NSPNAS > 0. But I do realize that people who assess the CV, look at the number of cross-reference (and how many people refer your article) to the publication too. So even if NSPNAS score is 0 (my present status), if you really have written a good paper, you will get the credit anyways (unless you are writing a stuff which the gang-of-editors are not able to gulp, like that H.pylori-GastricUlcer thing).

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