Science Blogging Conference 2008

Open Science

Hemai: The web isn't democratizing anything, it's just creating a new oligarchy.

Interesting ideas:

PLOS: Publish all papers in PLOS One, then the subject journals should be pulling content from PLOS One, picking the best, cleaning them up, and publishing them. In this way, you have the editorial function (in the subject journals), while maintaining an open community.
What about data-driven open publishing? Adrian Holovaty talks about moving to data-based journalism, what about data-based scientific publishing?
Is there a way we could indicate when a paper has been discredited? What if you went to a paper and all of the citations had little sad faces next to them?

Issues

Patents, technology transfer
Disconnects between academia and industry (particularly in pharma)
One of the issues with open publishing, simply put, is that not all science is equal
- Does open publishing enable the crack pots? Give them credibility they don't deserve?
The reality is that scientists aren't the only audience for open publishing. Journalists, and the public at large are also watching, and they can't make judgments in the same way. Heck, even scientists outside of a discipline can have trouble understanding a paper and its data.
- Outside of a field, it's really hard to know the "pervailing wisdom." How can we capture this information?
Peer review can't catch fraud without data, and even then it could be hard.

changed January 19