Praxis Carnival September 2008

Before I dig in and share with you all the wonderful ideas that have been percolating out on the web this month and my inherent fascination that so many people in such far-flung places are thinking about similar things at the same time, I would like to offer an apology for posting this so late.
Hurricane Ike brought the wonderful gift of my husband evacuating TX and coming to see me for a week and at the same time I had to disappear to go to court in CA for a couple of days. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, my scientific life stops when I get to see my husband because I often don't know how long I will see him or how long it will be until I see him again.
Thus, I apologize for making the decision to put science and everyone else last for a few days and I hope you will forgive me.

On to the good stuff. Praxis has received quite a few interesting posts this month which have given me a lot to ponder regarding the nature of how we do science, how it has changed since I was an undergrad and what implications it has for the future of science and scientific communication.

So first up: Getting/utilizing scientific information in the Google age (general)
The Scholarly Kitchen explains that researchers utilize procrastination as a tool for self-promotion in eprint submission announcements and that self promoters rely on visibility bias created by those who submit last being listed first. Philip Davis writes:

Physicists, like everyone else, look to the order of one’s paper as a heuristic for deciding what to read. This is no different than using other tools, like citations or references as tools to guide a scientists to what is important.

This is further supported by Ethan Zuckerman's review of a political science studies at My heart is in accra... He utilizes discussion of these studies to fuel his own research question:

My interest in these experiments has less to do with questions of political polarization and more to do with interest in international news. Are internet readers more inclined to look for information about other countries, since they’ve got such a wealth of information at their fingertips?

But he also implies that internet users, including scientists, can fall victim of their own sampling bias.
This suggests, as some have argued, that the internet age has actually changed the way we do science and how we gather information by overfocusing our minds on a few studies.
Paul Miller at Project Xiphos argues that the google age has in fact changed the way we do science for the better by allowing us to skim large quantities of data and then zero in on things which might be otherwise obscure.

Has Google made me stupid? No, definitely not. But ‘differently intelligent.’ The old measures don’t work for this. So do we throw out the opportunity because it doesn’t fit our metrics… or do we revise those metrics for a new - and different - reality?

He further suggests some tools that might assist with data acquisition and processing.
Zemanta at BBGM acknowledges that the way we access information has changed, but that this allows us to access information in new ways;

It’s easy enough to go from A –> B, but the fun part is going from A –> B –> C –> D or even A –> B –> C –> H, which is the fun part of online discovery. I would argue that in looking for citations we can now find citations of increased relevance, rather than rehashing ones that others do, and that’s only part of the story.

However, Dr. Spurt at Effortless Incitement argues that there is an economic way of accessing the change in how we do science.

How is this an economic phenomenon? Well, it drives down the (apparent) costs of procrastination - and if our sometimes fickle and unreliable selves are thought of a buyers of procrastination, we can expect ourselves to buy more of the same thing when the manufacturers lower the price.

We must therefore implement means of overcoming these costs, which include having the self-mastery to disconnect for a while.

From this, it is easy to transition to the next topic of hot debate: Open Science: What is it? Who does it benefit and hurt? And how might it be implemented.

What is it? Who does it help/hurt?
The case for open science over continuation of the publication system as it currently stands is made by Caveat Lector who utilizes anthropology as a vehicle for elucidation of this issue:

The stubborn tendency of scholarly societies to offer tacit and sometimes not-so-tacit support to Elseviley Verlag, when it’s Elseviley Verlag cutting off their air supply too, would baffle me except that I understand it’s a matter of perceived congruence in business model. Faculty (writ large) have thus far allied with their scholarly societies on this, which is a problem for both green and gold open access.

But it could have far reaching implications beyond the academy itself, as argued at DIY bio. Average people could have more opportunities to take science into their own hands.
Meanwhile Jean-Claude Bradley makes a case for Open Science as a means of sharing the serendipity that so often accompanies scientific discovery and that open science can be seen as a means toward sharing these discoveries instead of a simple replacement for traditional means of scientific communication.

And the case against open access is distilled by Isis the Scientist who argues that the greatest impact of open access science is going to be a financial one levied on the backs of the researchers doing the work.

The real question is, if everything is Open Access, who pays for the content? And who pays for the peer review process?
The answer is, Dr. Isis does and she has a family to feed and research to support. Dr. Isis pays for it either through increased dues, or meeting fees, or publication fees, or all of the above (and, let's be honest...it will likely be all of the above with time).

And a synthesis of both for/against viewpoints, with a slight bias toward open science being the ultimate way to go is presented by Jose at Academic Productivity.

How would we do it?
Pangeables argues that blogging, if brought beyond a simple discussion format could be a vehicle toward open science, greater scientific communication and greater collaboration.

In order to attract more people on the internet space, there should be an obvious incentive for them. Unfortunately, as long as blogging culture is only restricted to communicating ideas and discussions, people will not feel that they are benefited from blogging without any clear process and product for making a difference...This strengthens a rationale why blogging needs to accompany a framework for making a difference where people can develop collaborative projects and execute them towards products.

In addition to blogging, Wiki is promoted as a source for cataloging genomic data by Ouroboros. You tube is currently being tested as a medium of communication and outreach by Building Confidence.
And Flickr is used as a model by for how to overcome the limitations of endnote and ultimately to show how a vehicle toward open science might be enacted at Nature Network by Eva Amsen who is featured below in interview.

Moreover, Ouroboros gives a great listing of other technologies available to scientists for networking in her discussion of how "unconferences" are helping to define this movement.

The timing of open science evolution is described at One Big Lab as a gradual process. Catastrophism does not work for scientists.

And now that we have gone heavily into the big issues being discussed, I would like to focus on the day to day things we have to learn, the hurdles we have to overcome, etc in the business in doing science. There are again a few main foci of thought this month.

The first is on professional communication, oral and written, personal and scholarly:
Samia at 49 percent highlights the importance of professional communication, even when you are just a lowly student. Given that my advisor was kvetching to me about this very issue last week and how angry some students make her by being so discourtesous, I thought it was an important lead issue.

Publishing or perishing is heavily set on any academic's mind and thus follows a suite of posts about the machinations of publishing and it's implications for the job market.
Drug Monkey writes first about how to figure out where to place your publication, because not every article will end up in Nature or Science (N/S).

If your papers are being routinely accepted with only minor revisions, you are almost certainly not aiming high enough with the journals you are submitting to.

He then writes about the importance and function of publications outside of the N/S world. Michael Nielson has an excellent post on editing ones own work. And Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sig has a somewhat disheartening article on why review articles are useful, but why they probably won't get you tenure.

The second is simply the hurdles of science, including grant writing, publishing, outreach, etc.
Science is compared to the Olympics by Duncan Hull, which is very funny, but makes me think I need to get back to the gym and start lifting more citations ;-). However, he leaves out scientific outreach which is a theoretical component of a lot of NSF grants. Jen Doddcovers this and argues that scientific outreach needs to change and more importantly how we need to sell it to universities in order to get it to change:

In fact, universities should dedicate a certain amount of money to community outreach, just like most large companies do. When a bank sponsors a sporting team, it's not because the sport showcases their newest mortgage.

Then, Jen Dodd features an interview with Eva Amsen, a scientist and author, that touches on ways that individuals can make an outreach difference.

Finally, Science in the Open suggests that we need more diversity in the academy, not just in gender, color, or race, but also in diversity in contribution styles:

No monoculture can ever be healthy; certainly not in a rapidly changing environment. So diversity is something we should value for its own sake, something we should try to encourage, and something that we should search CVs for evidence of. Then the credit for these activities will flow of its own accord.

And the best, IMHO, for last is word clouds from various journals by nsaunders at What you're doing is rather desperate. Notice how important Nature thinks Nature is.

I hope you find this month's Praxis a heated and enlightening read. I have tried my best to avoid personally commenting and giving my opinion on this debate for the moment, so that everyone can read and decide for themselves. However, I may weigh in on the Open Science idea in future posts.

Again, I apologize for the lateness in getting this out and if I have made any errors in citation, please let me know ASAP.

Praxis will be hosted by my good friends over at The Other 95%. I am already looking forward to it.