Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
The last panel I attended on the first
day of SXSW was entitled "Web
2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing". The panel was moderated
by John Wilbanks from Science
Commons. John did an excellent job showing how a number of general internet trends are
effecting scientific publishing. Specifically, I was impressed by three major projects
the panel touched on:
Melissa Hagemann, the Program Manager for Open Access at the Soros Foundation, was one of the panelist. If you aren't familiar with Open Access, it is an initiative trying to get all scholarly research available for free on the Internet. Melissa explained that many supporters are now requiring the research they support via grants, to be provided under Open Access. In fact, the US Congress is considering legislation to require all research supported by the United States Government to be distributed under Open Access. The reason is that the government and other funders are realizing they are paying for the research twice. Firstly, they are paying to have the information created and synthesized for publication. Then they are paying again to allow other researchers to get access to that knowledge.
Timo Hanay, Director of Web
Publishing at Nature Publishing Group, discussed the beginning of an evolution in how the
impact of scientific research is measured. Historically, the impact of a piece of
academic research is measured by the journal that the research is published in. However,
that is evolving - the impact increasingly based on how the information is distributed.
One of the examples Timo showed was Connotea,
which Timo described as a "del.icio.us for scientific publishing". I spent some time
exploring the site tonight and it does seem to have all the typical social bookmarking
site features, but focused around tags for scientific publications.
As journals and other material are shared via Open Access, another key challenge is making it easy for individuals to discover the content they are most interested in. Interestingly, one of the most difficult challenges is understanding which individual wrote certain pieces of research. For example, a common name (John Smith) may be multiple people; or multiple spellings of a name (John Smith, John A. Smith) may be the same person. Proper attribution and understanding of the progress of a research project is very important, when trying to deliver meaningful search results across scientific publications. Many are hoping the 'semantic web' will make that easier. Interestingly, these projects are leveraging the SemanticWiki on People at Ontoworld to help with this.
While I was very familiar with all of the online media trends behind these projects, it was very interesting to hear how this is effecting the publication of scientific research and journals. It honestly was very encouraging! When I think about the productivity improvements that social media has brought to my life, I'm happy to hear that the individuals focused on finding a cure for cancer - and other significant projects - are using the same types of tools to improve their productivity.
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I took a look at Connotea and I think it has potential. Sadly, it is full of link spam and unless this changes I am not going to use it. Rather than having people submit links (of dubious quality) I'd like to see it used the other way round: let people tag and comment on links in Google Scholar. Google Scholar could be nicely extended to let users build their own libray of links to research papers.
Posted by: Christian Lindig | March 11, 2007 1:49 AMI think a very helpful article. Good information
Posted by: Gartenfackel | March 11, 2007 7:32 AMI have noticed the tag spam in Connotea too, but for me, its a way of keeping my library organized without the pain of Endnote. Google Scholar is not exactly ideal as a citation index, although it works well as a discovery source.
Posted by: Deepak | March 17, 2007 11:42 AM