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Add The Music chosen by Arikia Millikan, Anton Zuiker (well sort of) and Graham Steel. :-
Track one chosen by Arikia
Track two chosen by Graham
Track three chosen by David Dobbs via Anton
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Lots of #scio12 images, videos, podcasts & blog posts are on http://scio12.com/
Illustration by Adrian Forrow
I’ve just read the great piece (and very interesting comments thread) “Scientists, Share Secrets or Lose Funding: (by) Stodden and Arbesman” It reminded my of a bizarre incident that I came across myself a few years ago that I started writing about a few days ago and it ties in rather well.
Some background context
In my spare time, I acted as Vice-Chair for a small UK Charity 2001 – 2005. Like many other such organisations, we didn’t have an official HQ other than (in our case) “the office” which was a spare bedroom in one of our Trustees place of residence.
We met on a bi-monthly basis at
As I reside in Glasgow, travelling through to Edinburgh was a breeze. Getting to Sheffield was OK, travelled either by car or by train. With regards to London, back then, I would normally fly down as opposed to train these days.
By year three of my four year stint, whilst I was settled into my routine, it occurred to me that rather than flying all the way down to London and back for a two – three hour long meeting, wouldn’t it save time and money simply to join in the discussion remotely by webcam?
Given the fact that the majority of these discussions (in all three locations) were largely pretty much routine/informal in nature, this made perfect sense to me, and all my fellow Trustees fully agreed.
So this would surely proceed along the lines proposed.
WRONG
I was advised by one of our three Co-opted Members (our Medical Advisors) at that time that a certain Prof John Collinge – Director of the MRC Prion Unit also based at UCL Institute of Neurology – London strongly objected to this !!
I don’t recall the exact words as to why, but it was along the lines of “John does not allow camera’s in here”.
Armed with hindsight, I should have challenged this right away and to this day, don’t know why I didn’t.
Why was this objection so wrong?
Part of the reason I think can be explained by the well known (to those who know the disease well) fact that there has been an ongoing feud between certain researchers at the Unit’s in London and Edinburgh going back over 25 years or so. Cue this Lancet piece by James Butcher in 2004.
Now if this is how Collinge (and others like him) view members of the public, heaven only knows what his/their views are an how they treat other scientists, generally.
Moreover, it took Collinge & colleagues several years to reveal the unpublished data from their failed PRION-1 Clinical Trial – initially at a Conference in 2007 but it took a further TWO YEARS to actually publish the data behind a paywall, naturally.
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To me, the pull quote from the Stodden/Arbesman piece is:-
“As Jon Claerbout, a professor emeritus of geophysics at Stanford University, has noted, scientific publication isn’t scholarship itself, but only the advertising of scholarship. The actual work — the steps needed to reproduce the scientific finding — must be shared”.
PLEASE DON’T HIDE YOUR DATA !!
SHARE IT !!
Over the weekend, I received an email from a researcher at Scripps which read:-
“Hi Graham,
Nothing unusual about that you might think.
Interestingly, I had no idea who it was from until I did a quick bit of searching and I have never had any contact with them before.
I’ve had contact with A LOT of researchers in this field spanning over a decade. In terms of making contact, this has always been one way traffic. Pretty certain this marks the FIRST time that someone has made contact with me !! INTERESTING
I was curious to know two things. How did they know the field of research in question was of personal interest? The second question answered itself after I found out the answer to the first one.
As such, I email the individual and asked:-
“Hi Yervand,
Thanks for sharing this with me.
Purely out of curiosity, how do you know of my interest in TSE’s? I don’t believe we’ve been in contact before.
Best,
Graham
They replied pretty much straight away with:-
“Hi Graham,
Small critical RNAs in the scrapie agent
Yervand”
Having done a bit of rummaging since then, I note that the researcher has two publications indexed in PubMed, the most recent one being a PLoS ONE Manuscript.
If we go back to the thread on FriendFeed that they found, the discussion (and a very interesting one at that) was namely about the possible “pro’s and con’s” of having a pre-print archived in the likes of Nature Preceedings (NP) rather than the actual science in question. After all is was NPG’s Hilary Spencer (that’s not Hilary below BTW, simply a “confused face” on Flickr) who started the conversation there.
Having an item indexed in the likes of NP can be useful (I’ve used it once before) to “get your stuff out there” but just how visible is it to potential readers as opposed to having an item accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed Journal? I don’t know. Do you?
So, thanks to the “power” (and how things are indexed in) of Google, this person found someone who potentially would be interested in reading their stuff and sent an email. I hope they found others too.
Now surely, there must be some way of using systems to do this for you. Whilst the likes of Mendeley recommends other research papers, it also can suggest other researchers of interest. I know that ReadCube are also planning to do the latter shortly (personal communication on Twitter).
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Also this weekend, I spotted a link to Collabgraph on Twitter and gave it a quick spin. I tweeted a link to my Mendeley/Collabgraph generated data which look very interesting. If you can’t see the data on your browser (doesn’t appear to work on IE or iPhone), I saved the 3Meg .svg file to DropBox here.
The issues here also tie in quite well with this recent thread on Google+ and these three associated blog posts.
Whilst I won’t be at Science Online in North Carolina later this month, I willl as always be following events in real time and I’m sure some of the issues in this post will come up at some point.
A brief exchange on Twitter yesterday between @David_Dobbs , @para-sight and to a lessor extent myself, reminded me of a story from 2007 that until now, has never been told and prompted me to write this post.
The story in question involved a lot of emails, a few phone calls and I can’t be bothered reading through all the emails again, but I’ve glanced through most of them and recall the story in ma head anyways.
In late 2006/early 2007, I established contact with Feature Writer, Janyce Hamilton in America. I provided her with some useful information for a piece she was working on at that time.
Her next piece which is the one this post relates to was going to be one on Prions and dentistry which she was working on to have published in the prestigious dental journal, California Dental Association (CDA).
After review, the piece was accepted for publication and she was sent 100 glossy reprints and I agreed to assist her in the dissemination process at least here in the UK.
We then discussed the fact that this snail mail method was a tad web 0.0 so what could we do collectively to come up with a better methodology?
The CDA at that time was Toll Access (it flipped to Open Access later that year as I blogged here) so neither of us at stage one of the dissemination process had an electronic copy. <sigh>
Janyce shipped me 10 reprints so it was my intention to snail mail these to my relevant contacts at The Department of Heath, CJD Surveillance Unit, Health Protection Agency and so on.
Stage two. Dang, we could sure do with a PDF copy. Hhhm. My scanner was defunct and the one we had at work was out of bounds.
So I sent a reprint to a colleague in the UK, but they were in America at the time. A relative of theirs however, scanned a perfect high res. copy for me and emailed me it. BINGO !!!
Stage three. In the meantime, Janyce was in touch with the CDA to see whether or not they would send her the actual PDF and after much ado they did.
However, she received three conflicting emails. I can’t recall in what order but
In the end, the “official” PDF which was identical to our “home made version” WAS emailed to Prusiner, I emailed a large volume of copies in bulk dumps to loads of contacts. For a bit of fun, we both listened simultaneously to “Push The Button (Galvanize)” by The Chemical Brothers when I did this…. As you do 
A day or so later, Janyce said:-
“Phase 4 completed today:
More than 100 copies of the article were snail-mailed to every single U.S. dental school dean today, as well as most of the dental editors of journals in the U.S. (and one in Canada). They will get that mailing by Friday. It was an expensive investment in terms of postage and copying costs.
I’m about done with the phases, as I’m sure you are in terms of this article”.
Man, this whole reprint thing was/is a right pain in the arse and to me is simply another money spinner for Journals especially so in the digital age we live in (well most of us). Science is digital, baby….
The subject matter is not really important in terms of this post, but here is Prions: Transmissable Spongiform Encelphalopathies and Dental Transmission Risk Assessment This article looks at the complex questions around the implications of emerging data on the abnormal prion protein and infection control during hospital-based procedures as well as dental and oral and maxillofacial surgeries.
Janyce Hamilton
And my response, also published in the CDA.
I spotted this tweet on Twitter this morning that caught my eye. I responded with this tweet.
So included in the New Years Honours 2012 is a certain Mr Lester Firkins or as he is now known, Lester Firkins OBE.
“Lester Firkins. Chairman, James Lind Alliance, Strategy and Development. For services to Medical Research. (Nr Ipswich, Suffolk) “
During 2001 – 2003, Lester acted as Chairman of the Human BSE Foundation, and I was Vice-Chair 2001 – 2005.
We parted company. Lester went off to get involved in other things and in 2004, he was involved in setting up the James Lind Alliance whilst I went off and Co-Founded the CJD Alliance. Thankfully, we’ve kept in touch since then and I received a DM tweet from him only a few hours ago.
Lester is a busy man in respect of what he does in Patient Advocacy work and I’m very proud to know him in person. I do hope our paths will cross again sometime soon.
Until then, many congratulations @LesterFirkins on receiving this award. You thoroughly deserve it mate !!!
As mentioned on this page on BBC News:-
Patients’ alliance
“A father who helped found a medical research charity after his son died of variant Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease has been appointed OBE.
Lester Firkins, from Playford near Ipswich, helped set up the James Lind Alliance in 2004, three years after his son Ellis, 21, died.
It brings patients and clinicians together to promote what they believe are the areas most in need of funding for medical research.
Mr Firkins said: “I had always assumed the things that were important to patients and clinicians were the things that got researched, but they weren’t.
“As often as not it was what universities and leading academics decide they want to look at, and that seemed back to front.
“Close to £1bn of taxpayers’ money is spent on medical research and we leave it to the patient and clinician group to take [their recommendations] to the funders [at the Department of Health].”
A few months ago, Antony J. Williams kindly gifted me a copy of a book entitled “Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research” which he co-authored.
It came with a personal message on the first page:-
“Graham,
I dedicate this book to your collaborative actions and enjoy watching you in action !
Tony”
It’s a great book and I can highly recommend reading it.
Yesterday on Google+, I spotted a post by Tony which read:-
“I’ve had a number of people ask me for some guidance about how scientists can use some of the available tools to brand themselves as a Digital Citizen and expose their activities online. This is a first draft presentation”.
There is a link to this page which reads:-
“There are many social networking tools for scientists that can be used to share information, engage the social network and move information about activities across the web. This presentation provides an overview of some of the tools available and how they can be used by scientists to expose their activities, manage their profile publicly and participate in the network”.
And here is the presentation…..
These days, I travel from Glasgow to London several times a year now. For a variety of reasons, I prefer to travel by train (Virgin Express only takes around 4 hours 15 mins).
I book in advance, choose a table seat with a power socket for my mobile devices, sit back and surf the web/read a book, iPod Nano for music etc. etc.
By default, I tend not to spark up a conversation with the person(s) opposite simply for “idle chitter chatter”. However, should they decide to start a conversation, I’ll happily contribute to it (if it is of interest, or I’ll switch off).
Last week, I was sitting outside Euston Station awaiting my train back home after spending two days in London for the Open Research Reports SWAT4LS Hackathon. In light of the fact that Peter Murray-Rust (see last link) has already written a fairly comprehensive write up of the event, I don’t intend to add to that.
The BibSoup cluster (anticlockwise) : XX, Naomi Lillie, Tania Gray, Mark McGillivray, Jenny Molloy, Gilles Frydman, Graham Steel
I found out via Twitter (and by phoning a friend who was stranded in Motherwell and had just seen a bus stop shelter flying by) that there were severe weather conditions in Scotland and that train speed restrictions had been enforced across large parts of Scotland to 50 mph. Our train did leave on time, but we were informed that the service would be subject to delay after Preston.
Like all passengers on board, myself and the two other in our (seat) cluster of four were aware of the impending delayed journey. Of the three of us, one was the most up to speed on things for two reasons. I was the only one connected to the web and secondly, I had been following #hurricanebawbag on Twitter. Not only was this very informative, it was equally amusing. According to this page on Wikipedia, the storm was officially named Cyclone Friedhelm.
++ADDENDUM++ That hashtag apparently was trending globally around the time.
I soon became an Oracle of Information in this regard which my fellow passengers found most useful. The polite elderly lady sitting beside me was only travelling to the Lake District, so her interest in the storm was only passive. The young woman sitting opposite like myself was travelling to Glasgow so the two of us chatted together a bit more.
Whilst I didn’t catch her name (let’s call her Lucy), the free flowing conversation between Lucy and I was rather engaging and lasted throughout the duration all the way into Glasgow. Lucy was a 23 year old woman from England who was a 1st year undergrad at Glasgow University studying the Life Sciences. She had been to London to stay with family, and when she asked me why I had been in London, I said for a Hackathon. She gasped “what like computer hacking?”. I explained when most people hear the work hacking, they think of “the dark side” i.e. Computer Hacking as opposed to Hacker (programmer subculture).
I explained in a bit of detail what the 30 or so of us had been doing at the Hackathon and she seemed fairly interested.
She recommended two websites for me to check out, PowerBase and her favourite Journal, Antipode. I had a quick look at the latter on the train. The first thing I wanted to know was whether or not the Journal was Open Access. Lucy said “What is Open Access?”. I then gave a mini “lecture” about STM publishing. As she’s part of an Institution, she takes it for granted that she has access to the Literature and uses her brother’s library card to do the same when she is in London. A quick navigation of Antipode confirmed that it is published by Wiley, is Toll Access and the subscription prices are on this page.
Since I was wearing my PLoS Hoodie, I gave her a whirlwind overview of PLoS and their mission.
Lucy asked “Is Open Access material peer-reviewed?”. I said that this was a common question and “yes it is peer-reviewed”.
As I tweeted later when home:- “Had a fab convo today with a student from Glasgow Uni. who hadn’t heard of #OA but supports it 100% – She got an unused cool #PLoS tshirt”. !
During the conversation, the name George Monbiot came up. Lucy is a fan of his. I advised that I had recently done a podcast at The Guardian and that we discussed Monbiot during that.
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At that time, I was looking at new Tweets and right on cue was this one from Alok Jha.
“Results of publicly funded research will be open access – science minister”. LINK
David Willetts, the science minister, said the government wants to move to open access while protecting peer review. Photograph: Anna Gordon/Guardian
“The government has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals“.
MAJOR piece of news and perfect timing for the conversation.
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Later on, out of interest, I asked Lucy if people of her generation bought CD’s. “Never” she replied. “Why download stuff from i-Tunes when you can get it for free via The Pirate Bay and other sites like that”. A bit of an eye opener for me. Cue a previous post from my old blog “There’s Evian, then there’s tap water”.
By this point, the elderly lady had vacated the train, so we were able to have a slightly more liberating conversation.
Some of the #hurricanebawbag tweets were fucking hilarious and not repeatable when the polite elderly lady was present. It was also becoming clear that the storm had largely now passed, yet despite this, the train was travelling at 50mph as opposed to the normal 125mph. We were delayed overall by 1 hour 45 minutes. #ARSE
Lucy has only tweeted a couple of times, doesn’t find it useful. I explained that I use Twitter all the time and how for example the use of Hashtag’s works and how very useful this is when following particular events/conference’s etc.
Some of the #hurricanebawbag Tweets were (as it later transpired) clearly exaggerated such as “River Clyde has burst it’s banks in the centre of Glasgow”. When I relayed some of the tweets to another passenger, he said something along the lines of “Twitter? you can’t trust anything on that”. I do beg to differ.
Another question I thought would be interesting to ask Lucy was if her generation use email much these days. For her, other than booking a flight and formal things like that she said “No, never”. Facebook and the like are the default method of communication.
We got to Glasgow and off we went to brave the conditions of a very battered City. A lengthier than expected journey made interesting with the Web at hand…..
McDawg 3.0
Originally posted on my old blog here.
My involvement in Patient Advocacy leads to a vast array of interesting avenues. On one of the Forum’s that McDawg frequents, off Forum, I’ve made contact with a few folks in particular who post extremely interesting and thought provoking comments and are clearly, very intelligent people. The majority of these comments are accompanied with links to abstracts in PubMed.
Now, I’m not suggesting at all that the content of posts from others are not of value. Far from it. Everyone has something to offer. Having navigated these waters for a number of years now, users of the Forum would be the first to agree however that some people do very much stand out from the crowd. I’m not one of them but my “connecting people” skills is appreciated there.
Last year in particular, the first person unbeknown to anyone at that time to be “recruited” to the IGF was “Margaret” in Australia and then “Laura” in New Zealand a few weeks later. Broadly speaking, we’ve all gathered a lot of useful information and share much common ground. Our backgrounds are all quite different but we all very much have a reason for being interested in a particular disease.
This year, off Forum, contact was established with “Thomas” in Canada. We all started off emailing each other separately and this gradually started to morph into something bigger – more collective.
Thomas proposed that it would be a good idea or formally structure what we were doing, and also proposed the name of the International Gang of Four and since all were in agreement, that’s how we formed the IGF.
This also ties in very nicely with a Review Manuscript I was already working on about the disease.
“Julie” from the USA has been the most recent addition a month or so ago. Now that we are up to five, we’re still trading at the IGF but the “F” now represents five, not four.
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Rather than all working separately, I proposed that we should collaborate online using Google Docs. Some of us are more advanced than others in using it, but we’re making progress as a team.
We all still contribute to the Forum but in a way, as a group, we sort of outgrew it. Part of “the problem” is that off Forum, we share many Manuscripts using “Fair Use”, so are unable to continue with our detailed discussions in a public Forum.
What we are currently doing is uploading our own documents and presentations to Google Docs. At any given moment of time, any member of the IGF can access these, share, remix, whatever. We have a house rule that such access at the moment does not extend to those outwith the group.
This is somewhat ironic for an Open Access Advocate and indeed, someone interested in the concept of Open Notebook Science (ONS) and so on. Indeed, it was contributing to this thread on FriendFeed about writing a Manuscript on ONS and 2.0 social networking science stuff that prompted me to write this post.
So, should the IGF continue to collaborate in the way that we currently are or perhaps experiment with a wiki for example? I would say that we stick with doing what we are currently doing and think about this again at some point in the future.
Once we get to a point where we’ve actually produced something tangible, where do we go from there? Submit to a Journal for peer review? Most probably.
This is all very much a learning curve for McDawg at least in terms of scientific collaborations but not music collaborations. I’ve only done this once before (last year) with the end result being archived in Nature Precedings:-
Nature Precedings is a free online service launched in 2007 enabling researchers in the life sciences to rapidly share, discuss and cite preliminary (unpublished) findings. One year later, we look at some of the highlights.
Being a non scientist, a number of questions arise. How do scientists collaborate online? Do many actually do this? Should non scientists venture into such territories? What types of 2.0 tools do people/scientists use to collaborate online?
“Peter Binfield, PhD, publisher of PLoS ONE, discusses the scholarly journal and open access publishing at the Stanford Summit @ Medicine 2.0 on Sept. 16, 2011″.
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And a brief discussion (thus far) of this on Google+
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“Everything?” Watch/read on.
“Kirby Ferguson is a quirky New York-based filmmaker with an interesting idea” says Gregg Gordon, President and CEO of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). I bumped into Gregg on Twitter the day before this weeks rather excellent (Third) International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference which took place at Freie Universität, Berlin #pkp2011
I was unaware about this event until I saw a tweet from Gregg and followed events as best as I could via Twitter. Being off work for the week, I was hoping that something of interest would pop up so this was great stuff.
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So let’s cut quickly to a) this SSRN blog post by Gregg that caught my attention b) a more recent and extremely interesting SSRN blog post entitled “Remixing Scholarly Research” by Gregg that assisted in me composing this and c) the following amazing videos from Kirby Ferguson which prompted this post.
Everything Is a Remix Home Page
Check these out folks…..
The final part of this series of four videos is due out in October 2011.
To the extent possible under law,
Graham Steel
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
McBlawg 3.0.
This work is published from:
United Kingdom.
McDawg on FriendFeed
Graham Steel