Open Science Information Sources
Discussion
Chemistry-focused recommendations by Antony Williams, interviewed by Charles Knight:
Links at original at http://www.altsearchengines.com/2010/01/10/a-talk-with-antony-williams-of-chemspider/
"What scientific conferences do you recommend that young scientists interested in Open Science attend?
You and I will both be at ScienceOnline2010 in January 2010. That would be a good one for exposing people to what’s going on with Science Online, much of it Open. Many of the major conferences in any of the sciences now have sessions regarding data sharing and Open Science..it’s just a matter of looking for the session. Certainly my experiences with the Google SciFoo camp, one I was fortunately invited to on two occasions, was one of exposure to a lot of Open Science…unfortunately it’s invitation only.
What blogs should they read? Yours for one, right?
Mine is at http://www.chemspider.com/blog/. In recent months I have stopped visiting my RSS reader as much and look for what dribbles onto Twitter from the blogs and navigate over. Ones that I visit regularly are 1) Science in the Open from Cameron Neylon, 2) Useful Chemistry from JC Bradley, 3) Michael Nielsen’s blog, 4) John Overington’s CHEMBl’og, 5) the Mendeley Blog and 6) ALL of David Bradley’s blogs. I read a lot of others also, but this is a short list.
Whom should they follow on Twitter?
I’d suggest following David Bradley, Timo Hannay, Duncan Hull, Egon Willighagen, Cameron Neylon, Rafael Sidi and Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine). What these gents have to say is specific to my mixed domain of cheminformatics and publishing so may not be of interest to chemists directly.
Should they immediately jump into the lively Life Scientists room on FriendFeed?
As with all forms of social networking tools online I would say that people need to have an interest in such an environment to begin with. Many people don’t read blogs yet, many are unaware of what RSS feeds are, Twitter would be an annoyance and FriendFeed just one more on the list. It is a very small fraction of the community that is using these tools but it is growing of course. I find FriendFeed of value to ask questions and engage a group of domain experts in discussion but the reality is that, for me, this is a tight knit community and I could engage the majority of them directly by email. I believe that Cameron Neylon and JC Bradley have had success in using FriendFeed to initiate projects and activities around funding applications. The truth is that there are so many groups to interact with and so many activities already underway for ChemSpider that I have backed away a little from all of these tools of late just because of time limitations. I’m focusing instead on building closer working relationships with a select group of people with whom I can get things done and produce an outcome or measurable output. I found that I was losing a lot of time in a week on conversations that didn’t lead anywhere." (http://www.altsearchengines.com/2010/01/10/a-talk-with-antony-williams-of-chemspider/)