Open Laboratory 2008 is for sale

It's finally here and available for purchase at Lulu.com.

This year's editor Jennifer Rohn put together a collection of fifty-two selected blog posts showcasing the quality and diversity of science writing on blogs in 2008. You can see the background story on how the book came about here. You can order the first (2006) volume here and the second (2007) here.

I'll be ordering one copy for myself and one for the collection at work as I think that this is a worthy project to support.

If you want a preview of the contents of the book, links to all the winning posts are here.

I look forward to reading and reviewing the book.

ScienceOnline '09: Sunday summary and final thoughts

As with the Saturday summaries, I won't really go into detailed summaries of sessions -- you can get a lot of summary information on the conference wiki or on FriendFeed.

So, here goes. In each case, I'll link to the wiki discussion page:

Reputation, authority and incentives. Or: How to get rid of the Impact Factor — moderated by Peter Binfield and Bjoern Brembs

An intense session about a lot of different ideas, mostly generating a lot of questions but not a lot of answers. Is is possible to game the impact factors or influence how they are calculated? Are impact factors better than nothing? Should they be replaced by a variety of different performance metrics that each show a different things? Should we have performance metrics at all? If metrics are useful for filtering, will it be possible to replace them at all? How do you construct an incentive system for science if what's good for scientists (ie. using impact factors for filtering) isn't good for science (ie. distortion of science by using impact factors for filtering)? How do you align those two parallel incentive structures?

Hey, You Can’t Say That! — moderated by Greg Laden, Rick MacPherson, Karen James and Mark Powell

More questions! How do you manage your online persona? Once you say something, can you put the genie backin the bottle? Do you have to practice self-censorship? Should employers have rules and procedures about employee blogging, even if it's on their private time? And what do bloggers owe their day jobs?

How to search scientific literature – moderated by Christina Pikas and John Dupuis

A bit of bad luck for the presentation that Christina and I did, right at the very last timeslot of the conference. We couldn't get the data projector to work with Christina's laptop, nor could the tech support guy from Sigma Xi. So, our breezy interaction demo and tips sessions became...talk. Oh well. All in all, I hope that the attendees were happy with our tips and strategies, at least to the extent we were able to explain rather than show. We do have slide that we were going to shoe, here.

Final Thoughts

Another great conference, if anything objectively even better than last year. I say objectively, because subjectively my experience of community was rather profound and knowing what to expect this year, it's hard to compare those kinds of feelings.

And just like last year, the community continued to the last possible minute. Last year, I was hanging around with Deepak Singh and Salman Hameed more or less right up until I got on the plane back to Toronto. This time all the GTA attendees were on the same plane back home! So Sam and I hung around with Eva Amsen, Glendon Mellow and Michael Nielsen until the very last minute. Victor Henning was connecting home via Toronto, so he was there too. Eva has a picture of us at the airport.

The sessions were great but it was also great to renew friendships from last year, to see old friends again and to meet new friends. I know that Sam felt very welcome and not at all looked down upon as a kid and that his contributions and comments were valued as a peer; it makes a dad proud. I hope to bring him back again next year. There were vague rumblings of another London/European event, which I more or less promised Corie Lok and/or Martin Fenner that I would attend.

Unlike last year, I'm not going to even attempt to list all the people I met and talked to. Really, that was a bit odd what I did last year -- what was I thinking? The only one I will mention is the new scitech library blogger I met, Chris Clouser of The Logical Operator. After all, we librarians need to stick together.

Thanks to all the organizers for putting on such a wonderful show, Bora, Anton and David. See you all next year.

Nature Network Toronto Pub Night: Monday, January 26, 2009

From the Nature Network Toronto Forum:

There’s a pub night coming up! The theme of the evening is blogging.
As usual, it’s casual, but we’ve got a guest speaker, a report from the ScienceOnline09 conference, some science bloggers, and hopefully a hard copy of the new edition of Open Laboratory to browse through. The pub serves decent food, so come early and have dinner (and meet fellow Toronto Nature Networkers) before the talks start.

---

Have you ever thought that you’d like to start a blog, but wondered how to combine blogging with your work?

Toronto tech blogger (and “Accordion Guy”) Joey DeVilla will give a talk about how he successfully incorporated blogging in his life and work.

We’ll also look at the newest edition of Open Laboratory, a book collecting the best posts from science weblogs in the past year, and get a report from the ScienceOnline09 conference (held January 16-18 in North Carolina) to see some of the ways blogs are used in science.

Date: Monday January 26th 2009
Location: Fionn MacCool’s (181 University at Adelaide)
Time: 6 PM onwards (talks start at 7)
Contact: Eva Amsen eva@easternblot.net

There's a FaceBook event, of course.

It looks like it's going to be a great event and I look forward to seeing some of my GTA readers there. The ScienceOnline section will has the GTA bloggers who attended the conference talking about the experience: Eva Amsen, Michael Nielsen, me and possibly Glendon Mellow.

ScienceOnline '09: Saturday summary

So, ScienceOnline'09 was quite the experience again this year. My son Sam and I arrived in NC quite late on Friday night, so other than a quick drink there is really nothing to report for Friday. Sam's posted a bit on the conference so far.

Before I start talking a bit about the sessions I attended on Saturday, I just what to mention what my Theory of ScienceOnline was this year. I really ended up attending lots of sessions on topics that I really wasn't expecting, rather than some "usual suspects" type sessions. For example, I didn't go to the Open Access session or the Social Networking for Scientists session. Odd, since those are actually the topics I'm generally most keenly interested in, right? True, but I've been to sessions on those types of topics before so I ended up choosing in favour of other topics. And ultimately, I'm quite happy with that.

I won't really go into detailed summaries of sessions -- you can get a lot of summary information on the conference wiki or on FriendFeed.

So, here goes. In each case, I'll link to the wiki discussion page:

Science Fiction on Science Blogs? — moderated by Stephanie Zvan

This was a good session, but like all discussions on Science Fiction and X, it ended up talking about why normal people don't really appreciate SF. In any case, there was some talk about using sf as a gateway to engagement in scientific issues, and what role blogs could play in that, but not a lot. There were a few good book recommendations and some discussion about "What is science fiction for!" One thing I'm definitely going to track down is Tolkein's The Notion Club Papers!

Science online – middle/high school perspective — moderated by Stacy Baker and her students.

This was a great session, one of the highlights of the whole conference for me. Basically, private HS teacher Stacy Baker brought a bunch of her freshman and junior student to the conference and hosted this session where they could talk about what technologies they use in class and how they feel about the educational process in general as it pertains to social software. The kids talked about their use of software such as Twitter, Skype, AIM, Ning, FaceBook and others. More interestingly, the talk turned to the "creepy treehouse." In other words, how can kids, parents and educators co-exist in these online social and educational spaces, keeping it enjoyable, respectful and safe. The kids main message, probably to the despair of most educators, was "It can't be boring." I think we in higher ed will have a lot to deal with in a few years. BTW, these kids were absolutely amazing. Intelligent, articulate, funny and serious -- the future is in great hands.

Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond — moderated by Andrea Novicki and Brian Switek

Another very good session. For this one we broke up into groups and each group needed to come up with three ways to use blogs in education. The wiki page has very detailed notes for this, with all the ideas people came up with. This was an interesting session in that we never really seemed to run out of new ways to use blogs but we never really got to explore any particular ideas in depth.

Alternative careers: how to become a journal editor – moderated by Henry Gee (senior editor at Nature) and Peter Binfield (managing editor of PLoS ONE)

Since I don't want to become a journal editor, why did I go to this session? Mostly because I wanted to learn a little about what exactly a journal editor does and I was hoping that I'd gain some insight here.

And that's definitely the case, most particularly from Henry Gee of Nature. In his rambling, discursive style, he gave us all a very interesting picture of the life of an editor at Nature. Most precisely, the art (not science) of deciding what papers get published. He also made a persuasive case that journal editor should be considered a valid career choice for science people, not just as a fall back position for those whose more traditional career aspirations don't pan out.

Anonymity, Pseudonymity – building reputation online — moderated by PalMD and Abel

I'd tell you what happened in this panel, but then they'd have to kill me.

But seriously, I saw this session as one more about raising questions and speculating on possible best practices rather than giving hard and fast answers. Here's some of the questions that were discussed: Does anyone care what your real name is? Can a very determined stalker figure out your real name? How worried are you about being outed? What about revealing details about family members or posting pictures? Will you employer care about what you post? Do you need to let them know you have a blog before you start a new job? How about funders or sponsors? Is there an interaction between your real name and your pseudonym?

How to become a (paid) science journalist: advice for bloggers — moderated by Rebecca Skloot and Tom Levenson

As with most of the other parts of the science blogosphere, lately I've been thinking about what exactly science blogging is good for compared to more traditional science journalism. Of more precisely, how they're different and how both can be nourished and supported in their hopefully complementary (rather than mutually exclusive) roles. It seems to me that the main difference between the two modes is the emphasis on story telling, an idea that the moderators came back to repeatedly, even if indirectly. Blogs are slice of life, concentrating on one idea or event; journalism (at least in longer forms) is more about narrative, character and story structure.

Levenson and Skloot did a great job of exploring those ideas in the context of how a newbie could break into paid journalism from science blogging.

It's interesting that at the end, Tom tried to be controversial by maintaining that the habit and rhythms of blogging are inimical to being a successful journalist. Oddly, no one really took the bait.

I'll be reporting on the Sunday sessions next.

ScienceOnline '09: How to search the scientific literature

ScienceOnline '09 is in just a couple of days!

The librarian content this year will be Christina Pikas and I presenting on Sunday morning on How to Search the Scientific Literature. Being librarians, that's a topic we could go on and on about, ad nauseum. And since Christina and I come from different institutional contexts (she works at a lab and I work at a large university), I'm sure we'd both come at from different directions anyways!

However, given the savviness level of the participants at ScienceOnline and the unconference aspect of the conference, we thought it would be appropriate to put the question out to the potential audience of the session: What do you want us to talk about?

Are there topics, databases, issues, etc, that you've always wanted to engage the library community with but didn't know who to ask? Are there gripes or complaints? Things you think we should advocate for with the publisher community? Things we could be doing for you?

Have you ever just wondered what science librarians do?

Here's your chance.

Leave a comment on this post or on FriendFeed, email me (jdupuis at yorku dot ca), leave a note on the wiki page. And we'll see what we can do.

You can see who's registered here.

Update 2009.01.14: Bumped up to the top of the blog to give everyone another chance to make suggestions.

ScienceOnline '09: Register while there's still time!

As of right now, there are 171 people registered for the ScienceOnline '09 conference (January 16-18 in Research Triangle Park, NC), the successor conference to the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. The maximum for the venue is apparently about 200, so the waiting list will be starting up pretty soon. It's quite the stellar lineup of attendees with many notable names from the science and blogging worlds; a quick browse through the registration list will give you an idea of who's scheduled to come. I'm looking forward to a great mix of people I met last year and people I've always wanted to meet. Bora Zivkovic is profiling attendees and highlighting programming tracks over at his blog.

And speaking of the program, it's really shaping up this year to be very interesting with a good variety of interesting sessions.

As it happens, Christina Pikas and I will be doing a session (so far scheduled for Sunday morning):

A. How to search scientific literature – moderated by Christina Pikas and John Dupuis:

There are so many nifty tricks and strategies for searching the literature that an average scientist is not aware of. So: Ask the experts – the science librarians!

We'll be fleshing that bare-bones description out a bit more as the event approaches.

So, as is obvious by now, I'll be there, this time accompanied by my older son, Sam, who's really interested in all things scientific. There don't seem to be too many librarians who are registered yet that I can see, so I'd encourage the library crowd out there to consider attending. It's a great conference with many valuable insights into how science people are changing their ways in the Internet era.

ScienceOnline '09

Bora has just announced that registration is open for the new, improved version of what was previously called the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference: ScienceOnline '09.

It uses the unconference format, so you can follow the evolution of the program here. As seems to be typical of many conferences these days, you can also see who's registered to attend -- 26 people already.

Here's some of the text from the homepage:

ScienceOnline’09 is the third annual science blogging conference, to be held Jan. 16-18, 2009 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.

Please join us for this free three-day event to explore science on the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, bloggers, educators, students, journalists and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for promoting the public understanding of science.

*snip*

Our conference addresses a variety of issues and perspectives on science communication, including science literacy, the popularization of science, science in classrooms and in homes, debunking pseudoscience, using blogs as tools for presenting scientific research, writing about science, and health and medicine.

I went to the conference last year and it was a truly great experience. I'm 99% certain I'll be going again this time around. I'll also very likely be taking my science blogger son with me as well.