Call for participation for a workshop at CSCW 2010
[submission deadline: November 20, 2009]

The confluence of two major trends in scientific research is leading to an upheaval in standard scientific practice and collaborative technologies. A new generation of scientists, working in large-scale collaborations, is repurposing social software for use in collaborative science. Existing social tools such as chat, IM, and FriendFind are being adopted and modified for use as group problem-solving facilities. At the same time, exponentially greater and more complex datasets are being generated at a rate that is challenging the limits of current hardware, software, and human cognitive capability. A concerted effort to create software that will support new scientific practices and handle this data tsunami is redefining the collaboratory and represents a new frontier for computer supported cooperative work.

This follow-on event to a similarly themed workshop at CHI 2009 is intended to foster community among researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines interested in the changing dynamics of scientific collaborations.

We encourage papers on the following topics, especially those with a focus on changing practices in these areas:

• Collaborative scientific applications concerning data gathering,
  analysis, sharing, and visualization
• Case studies concerning data gathering, analysis, sharing and visualization
• Socio-technical research on scientific collaborations
• Social networks of scientists
• Repurposing social software for science
• Participatory design and/or rapid prototyping for scientific software
• Distributed data gathering and analysis
• Time-critical scientific applications
• Studies of generational differences in how science is done
• Cross-functional applications and comparisons of a scientific to
  a non-scientific field

For more information, please see the workshop web site:
http://www.sci.utah.edu/cscw2010/

Organizers:

• Cecilia Aragon, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, CRAragon@lbl.gov
• Jeffrey Heer, Stanford University, jheer@cs.stanford.edu
• Charlotte Lee, University of Washington, cplee@u.washington.edu
• Claudio Silva, University of Utah, csilva@sci.utah.edu

My colleague Alastair is conducting a survey about online academic collaboration, use of tools and attitudes to technology in the Academia as part of the Qlectives project. All participants who supply an email address (and complete the questionnaire by the 14 November) will be entered into a prize draw.

The Qlectives project based at the University of Surrey is conducting a survey to investigate how scientists collaborate and use technology. The questionnaire should take around 20 minutes to complete and is being conducted anonymously and confidentially.

As a way of saying thank you to those who take part, we will hold a prize draw for 5 x £20 Amazon vouchers when we have finished
collecting data (we anticipate that this will be around the 14 November 2009). To be considered in the prize draw, simply leave your
email address on the final page of the questionnaire, and we will contact the lucky winners.

A more detailed description of the Qlectives project and this study can be found on the first page of the questionnaire. Please also feel
free to share the study with other colleagues who you think would be interested in taking part.

CC-licensed image courtesy of Enrique Burgos Garcia

Google Scholar is probably the most useful tool on the web today for academics. However, there’s no API for it, and seems to add little to no features with time. I don’t think Google is going to give it the Axe any time soon, but … I can’t imagine ads getting clicked on scholar pages. And Google is a for-profit, so one never knows. In any case, it would not hurt to show Google that we care, and there’s one simple thing to do. If you want to support the creation of the API, you could drop by the google API forums and express your interest.

Hilarious visualization here:

Reminds me why, after sacrificing it to the washing machine twice, I decided not to have a mobile phone.

(credit: informationisbeautiful.net)

Looks like Elsevier experiments on how to present scientific papers are starting to get coverage  (on RWW no less).

The basic novelty here is real time search, but everything is peppered with other webby things like comments and AJAX.

The key features of the concept are here, and one can play with working prototypes. They are asking for feedback. I must say this is head and shoulders over reading a pdf on the screen. As highlights: (1) A figure that contains clickable areas so that it can be used as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures, (2) references are clustered by sections of the paper they appeared in, and hot-linked.

However, it’s not clear if this kind of effort is just cosmetic or actually an important change. From the RWW article:

Some parts of the available prototypes are interesting but opinion in the scientific community seems split. Is this ground-breaking stuff or yesterday’s news repackaged by another industry threatened by the web? That depends on who you ask.

Let’s see. A publisher is, by definition, someone that helps your ideas reach more people and influence them (or was that a marketer? ). How good are current academic publishers achieving this? Not very well I would say, although it’s not the publisher’s fault only: most academics write in a way that repels readers. The fact is even that a blogger living in the long tail handles audiences orders of magnitudes larger than most academics get with their scholar papers. So one interesting question for academic publishers is how to get our stuff in front of the eyes of the general public, with their ever-decreasing attention span.

In this sense, I think this ‘new way of presenting an article makes it a lot easier to read. So, kudos to Elsevier.

On the other hand, if we want to compete for the attention of the general public, this is woefully inadequate. The Author Interview is a nice touch, but would people care enough to listen to it? Would this interview be helpful towards understanding the article without reading it in detail? Only server stats can answer these questions.

And there are many new ways of gather opinions and solve questions out there. Apart from wikis and forums, there is a new contender: stackOverflow. The basic idea is that the best solutions to a question get voted up. This saves one the effort to go through a thread of  partial answers. It has taken the programming community by storm. Partly because it actually works better than previous solutions (do you remember question answering sites?) and partly because Joel Spolsky and Jeff Altwood backed it and pimped it to their huge audiences. Of course, it wasn’t long before someone (mendicantbug.com) proposed The Stack Overflow of Academia  solution. This is by no means perfect:

The benefits of peer review by the herd are great, but not without pitfalls. First of all, you can be herd-reviewed by morons. Moron 1 might think everything Researcher A publishes is GOLD and gives the thumbs-up no matter how badly the research was done. Ditto on the flipside, with Moron 2 hating everything Researcher A does.

In any case, it’s clearly different to the ‘snail mail’ model of peer review that we still use. The post at stackOveflow is a declaration of principles.

As a commenter notes, the (bigger) problem that remains is that publishers want to be closed and charge for content:

This would be great if it was Google or some other company that doesn’t already charge exorbitant fees. Elsevier is well known to charge some of the highest prices—$300-400 for technical books! If electronic journals with multimedia etc are to take off, it will be because they democratize access to cutting edge science by removing the fees currently charged by academic journals, not b/c Elsevier hires some AJAX programmers. I can only imagine that this will be used as an excuse to charge more for access to Elsevier journals.

Very interesting times. I sense a huge opportunity here somewhere. Michael Nielsen also agrees that Scientific publishing is about to be disrupted. It just not clear to me whether facelifts like what Elsevier proposes are enough, or we need a more radical change.

We want anyone to be able to contribute to ap.com. One way to do this is to leave blog posts open (but with a review queue). We proposed this method here, but not many people seem to be making use of it.

Maybe writing a blog post is too time consuming, and the barrier of entry is too high. An easy solution is microblogging: services like twitter let you share a tiny bit of something interesting you found (with a link), and anyone following you will receive it.

The thing with microblogging is that it doesn’t take much effort to share. Many people (including me) thought it was silly at first, but now it’s mainstream.

Since twitter provides real-time search you can find what people talk about right now. If you want to monitor a special topic, chances are someone came up with a unique way of identify the topic. A spontaneous way of organizing information outside the ‘follows’ structure emerged: the hashtag. These are terms that start with #, example: #iranelection. We have set up #AcaProd for academicproductivity. If you have an idea, or read something outstanding that you would like to share with us, just tweet about it and add #AcaProd somewhere in the 140 characters. Your tweet then is easily found by anyone interested in the topic. We will display all tweets in our front page too.

I found myself sharing a lot of interesting stuff over twitter, and much more often than through a blog, so I have a good feeling about this.

Of course, you should keep sending ideas/suggestions/complaints using our email, blog@academicproductivity.com

This could be a blessing. There are occasions where you (or your organization) have a lot of content in word files that would be better off in some form of collaborative/searchable repository. Wikis are very handy in these cases. However, it takes quite a lot of footwork to reformat all tables, headings etc to wiki parlance. This plugin for openOffice takes care of it.

Some people have chosen a wiki for their scientific homepage (Dario posted a tutorial in How to run an invisible wiki). I have considered it myself, although I’m more inclined to use a wordpress blog (post on how to set it up to maximize google scholar’s chance of getting your pubs coming soon!). One of the advantages of a blog over a wiki is that one can use a very good WYSIWYYG tool, windows live writer. Unfortunately only for windows. Now, this advantage is gone: one could reasonably set up and update without having to ftp files around or use crappy editors that come built-in with most wikis.

Good news for FOSS and the entire industry, really. Thomson Reuters claim didn’t hold on court. In an ecosystem where all competitors are launching new creative features every day (Mendeley, Zotero, citeSmart, jabRef, etc), development of endNote seems glacial.

EndNote maker’s lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed – Ars Technica

If you are interested in scientific blogging and collaborative tools for research and happen to be in the UK this summer, here’s an event not to be missed:

Science Online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

The event is cohosted by Mendeley and Nature Network. More information available here:

• www.scienceonlinelondon.org
• twitter.com/soloconf

The general agreement is that mail is broken. We all use it but kind of hate it too. Well, it seems that Google came up with a very good alternative (ambitious, and technically impressive): Google Wave.

A long video of Wave’s capabilities here.

It’s very long at 1:20hrs, but worth it. It’s peppered with random bouts of applause, something I’ve never seen in a scientific/technical presentation before. About minute 1:04, Lars Rasmussen presents real-time translation and he gets about a minute of standing ovation.

Why is this important for academics? Looks like sending a word document back and forth with version numbers in the file name is no fun. And setting a VCS with a bunch of .tex files plus figures is not much better (mainly because doing diffs on LaTeX files is pretty horrible). One could always convince a collaborator to use Google Docs, but then you have no way to use a proper reference manager, figures are a mess, etc. In short, scientific paper collaboration is not really pleasant right now.

In fact, it might be more appealing than desktop equivalents (say MS word) to write papers with collaborators, and better than a long thread of mails to simply organize a dinner out. So I won’t be surprised if many people jump on this as soon as it’s out. Wave is solving so many problems so well that it’ll be a rotund success. Here’s the interface:

The basically new thing is that you can see your collaborator typing away in real time, maybe in different parts of your manuscript. Although similar things have been around for a while (see for example etherpad), the way Wave integrates with other google offerings such as chat/email –may well be enough to gain adoption.

Wave supports images, and more editing features in general than etherpad.

One thing we get for free is version control: you can even move a slider to see how changes happened in your document. It’s pretty spectacular.

While Wave won’t be out for a while, there are developer accounts where one can sign up and get a preview.

Surprising: It’s open source, both client and server (!). I have no idea how they plan to disentangle the server side from the rest of Google’s infrastructure… Unless they ask you to reproduce all of part of it on your server – which is unlikely- I’m not sure how you could get this thing running.