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Revaluing Science in the Digital Age

Since Sunday afternoon I’ve been at an International Council for Science (ICSU) / Royal Society invited workshop on ‘Revaluing Science in the Digital Age’.

We’ve had a fascinating set of talks from academics, publishers (PLoS, Nature, BMC), librarians, policymakers, data managers, scientific societies…

Attendees included:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buneman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boulton
Jose Cotta, European Commision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Ball

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiv_Sydnes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengt_Gustafsson_(astronomer)
Prof. David Vaux http://www.wehi.edu.au/faculty_members/professor_david_vaux
Prof. Ovid Tzeng http://ihe.britishcouncil.org/going-global/speakers/professor-ovid-tzeng
Mark Thorley (RCUK)
Chris Banks  (University Librarian and Director, Aberdeen)
Mark Hahnel (Figshare)
Max Wilkinson (UCL, Head of Research Data Service)
Dave Roberts (ViBRANT)
Rob Frost (GSK)
Catriona MacCallum (PLoS)
Mark Forster (Syngenta)
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz (BMC)
Ruth Wilson (Nature Publishing Group)
Kaitlin Thaney (Digital Science)
Stuart Taylor (Royal Society)
Robert Simpson (Zooniverse)
Paul Groth (OpenPHACTS)
and more…

 

I gave a talk on content mining and the importance of full BOAI-compliant Open Access with respect to this, on behalf of the Open Knowledge Foundation:

There was lots of discussion on reproducibility, provenance of data, peer review, incentives, research misconduct and ethics.

I’ve met many new people and have learnt many new things. For example, on the subject of reproducibility I talked about Roger Peng and the journal Biostatistics in discussion, and then was soon informed that there was an analogous journal in Chemistry called Organic Syntheses whereby:

In order for a procedure to be accepted for publication, each reaction must be successfully repeated in the laboratory of a member of the Editorial Board at least twice, with similar yields (generally ±5%) and selectivity similar to that reported by the submitters.

Fantastic! We were also informed that this rigorous protocol ensures that research published in this journal is very highly regarded. I’ve suggested similar such reproducibility checks for phylogenetics research before (at the Systematics Association Biennial meeting Belfast, 2011) but this was viewed as too futuristic / infeasible…

Right now we’re working on a draft statement of outcome from this workshop that ICSU can pass to its members to possibly officially agree to endorse.

So I better finish here, and get back to the discussion.
I’m rather hoping they will endorse the Panton Principles rather than reinvent the wheel (policy-wise).

Exciting times!

 

PS I have made a Storify of the tweets from the workshop here .


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One response to “Revaluing Science in the Digital Age”

  1. […] notable event I was particularly proud of speaking at and contributing to was the Revaluing Science in the Digital Age invite-only workshop organised jointly by the International Council for Science & Royal Society […]