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The first official day of ScienceOnline2010 began with early morning registration and breakfast, where I had my first encounter with doughnut muffins. Who knew such treats existed?! For those who are curious, it was shaped like a muffin, with dense cake-like dough, entirely covered in sugar. Not a bad start to my day!

To give a bit of context, ScienceOnline2010 is a small conference, with 267 attendees (thanks Bora for attendee #s correction!). All events are held at Sigma Xi in RTP, so even though you certainly don’t interact with everyone, you generally see them, and I bumped into fellow ZSR attendee Sarah Jeong several times. This was my third year at the conference, and it was exciting to reconnect with folks I met in previous years. I was also pleased to see that there were more librarians in attendance – and presenting – this year!

There were three sessions before lunch (provided by Saladelia and delicious as always!), and three in the afternoon; links to the wiki page for each session plus highlights from my notes are below. If you have questions about anything, ask!

From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing – Tom Levenson, Brian Switek and Rebecca Skloot

  • use your blog as as writing lab to develop your voice and your audience, as well as a promotional platform
  • reach out to other blogs with audiences who otherwise wouldn’t hear of your book early
  • getting book deals often relies on happenstance of who you know, who you meet; online presence increases chances
  • finding YOUR voice is more important than your subject matter in some respects
  • who do you read? if you aspire to follow one of their paths, read from professional stance to analyze what they do
  • Q: can you make any money? A: welcome to our hobby!

Science in the Cloud – John Hogenesch

  • more data from more sources requires more collaboration, as well as massive and ever-growing computational resources
  • academe typically responds by buying storage and clusters, which works great…for a while; too dependent upon unstable variables: IT staff “demigods”, facilities, depreciation, usage (can’t see into future)
  • cloud computing offers three principle services
    • software as a service (SAAS)
    • infrastructure as a service (IAAS)
    • platform as a service (PAAS)
  • familiar SAAS use case: email
    • evolved from server-side (Pine) to client (Eudora) to cloud (Gmail)
  • SAAS collaboration examples include Basecamp, Google Groups, Google Wave, wikis, Google Docs
  • IAAS use case: RNA sequencing
    • problems include sheer magnitude of data; scope of problem only getting bigger
    • BLAT on Amazon Web service one solution
  • PAAS use case: publishing in the cloud
  • Q: is cloud computing opening research to others who don’t have access? A: yes because in-house data clusters are not easily distributed or shared
  • some concern that funders are less willing to award grants that ask for money for cloud computing costs, even though those costs may be lower than implementing a local data solution, as there are privacy concerns as well as differences in capital costs vs. design costs

Legal Aspects of Publishing, Sharing and Blogging Science – Victoria Stodden

  • copyright is a strong barrier to scientists’ ideal sharing context
  • Q: are blog comments under the copyright of the commenter or blog author? A: the commenter holds copyright, which makes moderation/removal of inappropriate comments by blog author potential copyright violation, unless there is a clear statement/disclaimer exerting non-exclusive license to do so
  • in the UK, blog comment moderation opens the author to libel responsibilities
  • if you don’t want copyright protection, you must actively dis-avail through licenses, such as those available through Creative Commons (CC)
  • CC licenses do not clarify/define “noncommercial”
  • patents are also a barrier to sharing, as you cannot publish about potentially patentable work until patent is secured or you risk not getting the patent
  • Stodden is advocating the use of attribution-only licenses for all elements of scientific work, including code and data, so it can be reused at will
  • stewardship of raw data, both archiving and sharing, already huge issues and it will only get worse

Scientists! What Can Your Librarian Do For You? – Stephanie Willen Brown and Dorothea Salo

  • researchers spend too much time poking around in different places (i.e., PubMed, Google, Google Scholar) trying to access full text
  • direct quote from researcher in room: “if I cannot get it fast and free, I won’t read it” – authors need to think about this as they write
  • rather than ask how to get scientists to library, librarians need to turn the question around and ask how to get into scientists’ environment
  • researcher in the room made suggestions for librarians to offer publishing support that includes:
    • data on number of colleagues at institutional also publishing in x-journal
    • citation style knowledge/assistance
    • submission requirement knowledge/assistance
  • scientists’ ideas about librarians calcified either as walking wallets for journals or bun-toting shushers; instead we need to be known as information policy on legs
  • conversations with colleagues are important for bridging gaps between librarians and scientists
  • if you are concerned about data management, talk to your librarian NOW
  • if your institution won’t accept non-peer reviewed literature in the institutional repository (IR), or if it doesn’t have an IR, talk to your librarian NOW
  • institutional nature of IRs forced on us a bit by publishers who require posting to institutional servers
  • IR point of failure on both ends – librarian and researcher – is ingest; we have a long way to go to improve

Open Access Publishing and Freeing the Scientific Literature (or Why Freedom is about more than just not paying for things) – Jonathan Eisen

  • one impediment to openness is institutions’ desire to recover money from research investment
  • fair use is size dependent when thinking of open educational resources (e.g., courses on iTunes U)
  • institutional archives/IRs serve many purposes beyond journal articles, so they need multiple outlets
  • how we pay for access in movement to openness will not always be equitable

Online Reference Managers – John Dupuis and Christina Pikas moderating, with Kevin Emamy, Jason Hoyt, Trevor Owens and Michael Habib (Scopus)

(NOTE: I attended this session to learn about other free programs besides Zotero, so my notes below are just highlights of each. Q&A with the panel didn’t provide any enlightenment beyond that which Giz brought to our Zotero class last week.)

  • CiteULike (sponsored by Springer)
    • tracks social bookmarking of research papers
    • can copy papers from others’ libraries
  • Mendeley
    • similar to last.fm – surveys what you download and makes suggestions
    • pulls metadata to aggregate readership statistics
  • Zotero
    • can mine your own research history
    • drag and drop references into text fields and citation is auto-generated
  • 2collab (Elsevier)
    • not currently open to users due to spam
    • hoped it would be discovery tool closely related to Scopus and ScienceDirest
    • author IDs (from databases) populate author profiles on 2collab