Guest Blogger Hope Leman
Hope Leman is a Research Information Technologist at the Samaritan Health Services Center for Health Research and Quality, co-founder of Next Generation Science, a staff writer at AltSearchEngines and the Web administrator of ScanGrants. You can find her on NextBio, FriendFeed and Twitter.
As I try to grasp the revolution in scientific and medial research that Science 2.0 and Medicine 2.0 are effecting I often find that I am literally being rendered sleepless by trying to keep up on the writings of the leading thinkers on the subject such as Cameron Neylon, Jean-Claude Bradley, Michael Nielsen and the new kid on the block, Steve Koch.
It is quite daunting to try to keep up with the many fascinating things they have to say and the many links they provide to their colleagues in the field such as Bill Hooker and Rich Apodaca (How I wish that the latter two would add “Follow me on Twitter” buttons to their blogs. They have fascinating things to say and I find that the best way by far to keep up with thinkers and doers is via Twitter. RSS is so 2006.)
As I sat down to write this post about an hour ago (it is now 4:53 a.m.), I first decided to catch up with recent entries here on the NextBio blog.
I read through Steve Koch’s thoughtful discussion of Open Science and had the curious reaction of being both amused (by the use of the word “icky”) and moved by his statement, “I try to move away from all of the icky, unproductive, unhappy, and unnatural closed science behaviors that I have been taught.”
I remember well in the 1980s that a young biochemistry graduate student I knew at Oregon State University got into deep trouble simply for discussing with scientists at another institution his research. I was a liberal arts major and could not fathom why sharing his excitement and the joy of discovery with other scientists was a bad career move for him.
It really is hard for me to quite grasp the formidable obstacles that dedicated, pro-Open Science researcher/teachers like Koch and Bradley face in trying to bring science into the 21st century and their fortitude and perseverance in attempting to instill in their students the value of openness when so many scientific traditions militate against such openness. It is a hard slog and these men are truly heroes in the advancement of knowledge. They are tireless in their efforts to advance science and combine the ability to marshal eloquent, persuasive arguments with what seem endless reservoirs of energy and stamina. In the course of writing this essay, for instance, I had a plethora of tabs open in my browser linking to Koch’s essay and to fascinating posts elsewhere by Nielsen and Neylon.
One of those tabs was marking for me the same essay by Michael Nielsen that Koch refers to, Doing Science in the Open which is must reading for anyone interested in Open Science and indeed science, period.
Nielsen is a cogent explicator of matters that anyone interested in the future of science should follow. We all look forward to the book he is currently working on.
I thought of the dedication and leadership that Koch and Bradley show their students (Bradley even helps sponsor a prize, the Open Notebook Science Challenge, in an admirable attempt to generate interest in the sub-branch of Open Science, Open Notebook Science) and their exemplary role modeling and their engaging combination of infectious enthusiasm with unimpeached scientific credentials as I read Nielsen’s discussion of the major cultural barriers men like Bradley and Koch face in fostering the use of online collaboration and engendering in their students an ethos of sharing. They teach its value for both altruistic reasons and hard-headed scientific ones: transparency prevents wastage of time and resources and ambitious young scientists generally lack both.
And speaking of resources, Cameron Neylon is an absolute master at monitoring the flow of software tools that are discussed in such venues as the Life Scientists room of FriendFeed and providing both quick takes on them there and in thoughtful think pieces on his blog. I am still engaged in reading his series on the implications of Google Wave in science, for instance, and if I were a venture capitalist in the life sciences (would that I had that kind of bankroll), I would keep Neylon on retainer.
A single post of his, for example, “What Would You Say to Elsevier?” has several fascinating comments on ways that publishers could actually make money in the world of Open Access.
I spend many, many hours working on the health sciences grants listing service, ScanGrants. That entails visits to the Web sites of grantors in the health sciences (scientific societies, the professional associations of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists and so on) and I am often struck by what a poor job they do in making the case of the value of the grants they have made. Often the material is quite dated and is presented in a perfunctory, lackluster fashion.
What a boon, then, it would be to such groups (and I admire very much the work they do—it is really moving to see how hard such organizations work to scrap money up for research and scholarships) as they try to persuade members to pony up to contribute to the foundations such organizations often back and need contributions from members for, if they could more easily aggregate data on previously funded projects and those currently in process. They could then present in a compelling way to their own members, to the general public and to potential applicants for grants: they want stellar applicants, after all, and looking like a galvanizing, dynamic force in science rather than a mediocre, inert one is the best way to do that. Simply acquiring facts on their own funding programs so that they can present them on their Web sites for PR purposes and so that they can be more effective funders is very much in tune with what Neylon says here:
“Tracking via aggregation. Funders and institutions want more and more to track the outputs of their research investment. Providing tools and functionality that will enable them to automatically aggregate and slice and dice these outputs is a big business opportunity. The data themselves will be free but providing it in the form that people need it rapidly and effectively will add value that they will be prepared to pay for.”
Clearly, there are firms that stand ready to provide such services—like ResearchScorecard and NextBio, which has very courteously allowed me to write this post which I had better wrap up so that I can read more of what the people discussed in it have been writing lately.
So, who’s who? Porthos, Athos, Aramis, d’Artagnan?
I could add the button but there wouldn’t be anything to follow. I only use Twitter to search for rapid news updates and never tweet anything myself.
I tried Twitter for a few weeks and found it far too noisy for me to use as an efficient info stream — I spend too much time online as it is! So now I only get the tweets that are piped into FriendFeed, which seems to give me pretty good coverage.
I think you can trust your network on this one. If I say anything useful, someone you are already following will either have the same idea independently or point to what I’ve said. You won’t miss anything by not following me.
Hi, Bill. Thank you for your funny note. Steve Koch would be d’Artagnan, as he is the newest on the Open Science scene of the figures I discuss. I do worry that people looking for material on the novel by Dumas will get to this post and say, “What has all this got to do with French swashbucklers?”
You are far too modest—everything you say is of substance and well worth reading. But I think you are right that people do point to it and I will have to rely on that to keep me apprised. Not a very scientific method, but given your stubbornness on Twitter it will have to do.
Hope
As an octagenarian non-scientist ( I am a retired surgeon who was once told by an academic internist that a double-blind study is a study conducted by TWO surgeons ), I am probably not entitled to offer an opinion on this subject in this century. However, I am very much in favor of Open Science, particularly as it relates to medicine and health-related topics. I cherish the ideal of an open cooperative scientific community where the virtue of helping each other, instead of beating out or outstripping each other, is the ethos. The monetary rewards from patents of new products and processes encourage secrecy, discourage transparency and collegiality, and tend to slow commercialize their integration into society. So, I say sic’em to the Four Musketeers, as they charge against the Four Horsemen of the Scientific Apocalypse!!
Craig B. Leman. M. D.
Speaking as your daughter, Craig B. Leman, I am honored you stopped by. Frontline physicians (like you) and their patients are the ultimate beneficiaries of the Open Science movement. And you taught me to admire people like our Four Musketeers—intelligent people putting their skills to use for the greater good of humanity as you have done all your life.