Science in the openWhat can be done? What should be done?

Science in the openWhat can be done? What should be done?

And where might it

lead?

About me.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andypowe11/3915450391

I live in Bath

I work at RAL

I work for STFC...

ButThe opinions expressed in this talk are the personal views of the speaker given as a private citizen and should not unders any circumstances be taken of as indicative of STFC, RCUK, or government policy or of any discussions within these organizations of future policy....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andypowe11/3251538402

I get up in the morning

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattbuck007/3710451826

...and catch a train

...and a bus

...to get to work

Wikimedia Commons Succinate_Dehydrogenase_1YQ3_and_Membrane.png

Wikimedia CommonsMGMT BDNA_1T38.png

I work on...

...and get to do cool stuff

Mixture of small-lab work...

...and big facility experiments

http://www.flickr.com/photos/loty/326761635

Lots of reading...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/38961674

...meetings...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22819720@N02/2306780847

...too much travel...

Why?

Why do they pay?

Why do they pay?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mararie/3313582639/ CC-BY-SA

Why do they pay?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mararie/3313582639/ CC-BY-SA

we

Cures...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59334544@N00/2322167178

http://www.flickr.com/photos/natematias/310642831 CC-BY-SA

Prestige...

...excitementhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/penmachine/2109311458/

Why do I do it?

Mortgage...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/2143212474 CC-BY

...curiosity...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/emiliodelprado/225161313

Fun!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2908834853

This is a privilege.

Not a right.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescridland/3947254236

But how?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/2248744703

But sometimes...

...formal publication

http://flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2756494307/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/siberianluck/3450937497...is overkill...

An example

9:00 am, 4 September 2008

Flickr tag: UC207

http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp207

7:36  pm,  4  September  2008

Publishing is easy...http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybershotking/329184504/

...data, documents, media...

Broadcasting is easy...

...sharing is harder

http://www.flickr.com/photos/missrogue/107787363

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfllaw/222795669

Interoperability is the key...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffsand/3871415191

Technical interoperability...

...formats, vocabularies

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spunter/3239363956

Legal interoperability...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spunter/3239363956

Legal interoperability...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spunter/3239363956

Legal interoperability...

Technical interop.

Legal interop.

Process interoperability

Systems need to work with existing process

...and people

A short story...

MyTea project:A fully semantic laboratory recordfor chemistry

http://mytea.org.uk/

But not molecular biology

StructuredUnstructured

General

SpecificMyTea

StructuredUnstructured

General

SpecificMyTea

?

StructuredUnstructured

General

SpecificMyTea

Blogs

?

A recipe for chaos?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/benuski/3452291541

Yes to start with...

But then something interesting happened...

Templates Metadata

Sequence ontology:SO:0000696 “oligo”SO:0000155 “plasmid”

...but...

SO:0000006 “PCR product”or

SO:0000412 “rest. fragment”?

Self assembling ontology?

Capture first...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/furtwangl/3851841424

...then add structure

Dionaea muscipula Musca domesticachomped on

Map our process onto agreed vocabularies

...when we tell the story

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tnarik/366393127

Machines do structure

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/2463225297

Machines need structure

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/2463225297

....humans tell stories

Tools that capture the pieces of the research

record as we create them

Tools that capture structure as we choose

the pieces for our narrative

Tools that exploit structure that is already in the process

What can we do?

Technically able to share

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/3088582622

...the whole record

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AGBell_Notebook.jpg

...but will we want to share?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2162663143

No.

The mainstream response looks like

http://flickr.com/photos/zanotti/314391903/

...or...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tammra/283690669/

...leading to a lot of...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tranchis/3708549622

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattymatt/3017263513

How do we persuade?

Actually I’m not worried...

0

25,000,000,000

50,000,000,000

75,000,000,000

100,000,000,000

1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006

Submissions to Genbank

0

1.25

2.50

3.75

5.00

1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006

Average Capacity of Human Scientist

The human scientist(that’s me)

Does. Not. Scale.

The web scales

Government doesn’t scale

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/38961674

...research groups don’t scale

The web scales

Scientists will need to be web-native just to survive

Web native means connected

Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Bettencourt L, Chute R, et al. (2009) Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803

which means sharing...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doubledareya/2443303399

“I propose the seeming paradox that in science, private property is

established by having its substance freely given to others

who might want to make use of it.”

Merton (1988) ISIS 79:606

Not just papers

And if the objects are not open and available?

Open content builds the network

The network is the only way we will keep up

If we build tools that help scientists build networks...

http://flickr.com/photos/good-karma/710068054/

… then (more) open research will follow

Cameron.Neylon@stfc.ac.ukhttp://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopenhttp://slideshare.net/cameronneylonTwitter: @cameronneylonFriendfeed: cameronneylon

Thanks to:Sciencetwists, Friendfeeders, and the wider online community for ideas, criticism, and conversations.

Deepak Singh, Larry Lessig, Andy Powell, and John Wilbanks for presentation inspiration.

Flickr and Wikimedia Commons for images

Text