Open Science

Just wanted to recommend this article to any science librarians out there:

Doing science in the open

by Michael Nielsen

A excellent distillation of the barriers facing open science. Issues such as a lack of trust infrastructure and incentives and a lack of appropriate collaborative/science network tools. Plus the fact that the current grant and journal system, which was initially set-up to ensure scientific discoveries were shared, is now stopping people from sharing their research in the more efficient ways offered by the web.

Scientific biographies

I’m currently reading Harold Varmus’ autobiographical memoir “The art and politics of science” (1).  Varmus was director of the NIH, was heavily involved in PubMed Central and more recently in the Public Library of Science venture.

His chapter on access to the scientific literature is interesting – he became an open access “convert” when someone drew his attention to arXiv, and recalls at least one occasion when he could not access online something he had written.  

But the thing I wanted to blog briefly about is something else.   There are chapters that describe his medical research (he was awarded a share of the the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for his discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes).   They do assume a level of happiness with reading science, but not an intense familiarity with his field, and so I found them written in a way that I could follow, and in a more narrative way than a textbook.   And so perhaps there is a role for memoirs and (auto) biographies in broadening my knowledge of the fields I work to support.     It would be interesting to see if other memoirs are the same – Varmus, it ought to be noted, studied literature before he studied medicine.

(1) Varmus H. The art and politics of science. New York, Norton, 2009, if you want a librarian-ly reference!

All new in the Galaxy Zoo

I was going to blog about my trip to Aber over the last two days, but then I had a more exciting email (sorry repository world) – Galaxy Zoo, my favourite collaborative astrophysics project has just launched Galaxy Zoo 2.  Both myself and my other half spent many happy hours with the first version classifying galaxies observed from the Sloan Deep Sky images.  It is curiously addictive, and more importantly – it’s for SCIENCE!

And did I mention you didn’t need to be an astrophysics specialist or former image analysis scientist to take part?  And considering how natural classification comes to most librarians, you’d be mad to miss it.  Well worth a look, and certainly more than a little soothing to do in those five minutes between reinventing Library 2.0 or solving the world’s information literacy challenges!

Postgraduate sessions – a bit of a review

Whilst the four sessions I’ve run recently for PhD students haven’t been packed, going on the feedback they were much appreciated by those who attended them.  I’ve just gone through the feedback for the sessions and I’ve been rather pleasantly surprised.

• Advanced database searching fo Science Postgraduates
  • Overall, this session was
    • Very good 71%
    • Good 29%
  • This session was
    • Just the right length 86%
    • Too long 14%
• Bibliographic Databases & Keeping up to date for Postgraduate Students
  • Overall, this session was
    • Very good 86%
    • Good 14% 
  • This session was
    • Just the right length 83%
    • Too short 17%

Not quite sure if I’d want to do more than 2 hours on RefWorks and EndNote AND keeping up to date!  But those aren’t bad results all in all.  I was very pleased that the elements on Open Access along with searching and using quality OA resources were especially popular, with students asking for more.  As they say ABM*! Best student review quote has to be:

“Excellent session, most useful one so far! All very useful and interesting.”

As for stuff they didn’t like…most said “Nothing” or “All things were necessary” which is very rewarding to hear.  On personal reflection there are a few elements I want to revise before running these sessions again; changing location to a smaller room given the numbers might be one I’ll try pursuing!  I also think I want to make use of a digital format possibly for the workbooks, as I estimate I’ve spent about 5 hours just photocopying and stapling materials for these 4 sessions alone.

Slides are available for those interested – Databases session & Bibliographic session

My one worry is that elements of what I was teaching may have overlapped a little to a lot with some of the session Keith, Selina and probably even Stuart have been teaching.  But then since the whole programme seemed to emerge from the fog fully formed without much input from our end, perhaps that is one thing we now need to look at in retrospect.  So the big question – is there going to be a course review meeting, and how do we ensure that the library is represented on it this time?

*ABM = Always Be Marketing

Library web pages

The University of Cambridge library has given its web pages a distinctly web 2.0 look.  Their science pages  still include the familiar metasearching across library databases, the library catalogue and e resources.  There are now alot of RSS feeds – from external resources and also news from their departments, science blogs, and new books at the library.   There is a live chat box for users to contact the library, as well as the usual list of contact methods.  Users can use a word cloud to navigate to the page for their department. 

It looks good, but visually there are almost too many feeds for my taste.  Is this me, or do you just stop seeing what is there?  It looks like a Pageflakes page, which I think if you haven’t designed it yourself is offputting.

I like the links to their own latest research and the focus on how to contact the library.  Perhaps the way forward is to try to promote local blogs, local research, local projects, connecting people as well as the usual library resources.  Not to mention information literacy related materials of course.

Small Worlds hands on

The power of social networking in a professional environment was self-evident even before yesterday – I wasn’t down to help out with Alan’s session, but whilst we’d been chatting over Twitter the night before he’d invited me to come along.  Glad he did, as it was certainly one of the more satisfying bits of student teaching I’ve done in a while; helped by the excellent student teacher ratio which must have been close to 4:1.  That was certainly better than the RefWorks class I had the other week; but that’s another story entirely.

Yesterday’s session was a follow up to one Alan had led about online social networking and was the hands on explore for yourself resources like Delicious , Twitter and the Small Worlds Wiki for about 20-25 students.  For a good chunk of the session the students were registering on Small Worlds and creating their profiles, and then they were off to explore the various social tools -in most cases it seems without stopping to read the instructions and help on the Small Worlds site. 

Not that I can blame them, that’s exactly what I do – refreshing to meet so many people with a similer learning style to myself!  I spent the time during the session, as Alan put it, “chatting up” the students.  Alan, like my MiL uses chatting up in the context of talking to them, social networking in vivo rather than in silico if you will.  They were a great bunch of students and it was refreshing to see them pretty quickly get to grasp with not just the tools, but how they could use them in their studies and research. Very rewarding, and repeated today with Selina in residence.