[open-science] Open Science at the British Ecological Society annual meeting

Thu Sep 15 14:25:56 UTC 2011

Cool. Thanks for the feedback.

You're right about the number of parallel sessions; things were more
spread out in the morning, but still I count that the 'digital
science' session was competing/overlapping with at least 4 other
different sessions on offer, namely:

'National Ecosystem Assessment'
'ML & Bayesian workshop'
'Biodiversity and ecosystem services sustainability'
and
'Forest Ecology & REDD'

Given this - I was pretty thrilled to see a packed room.

I'm saddened, but equally not surprised to hear that someone wasn't
convinced on 'Open Data' principles.

The 'What if we want to get further analysis & publications from the
data?' is the classic worry, everyone speaks about, and I understand
why.

The key to this is valuing your data being re-used by someone else
(data citation).
At the moment people see this re-use as bad [scooping], rather than a
good thing [my data was re-used, I got a citation for this re-use, win
for me, win for them, win for science]

For some reason, a lot of academics don't seem to take any pride in
their data being re-used by others. But isn't this the whole point of
science? Science isn't just about generating hypotheses and
conclusions. A large part of science is about generating new data (and
then testing it, re-testing it, adding to it, testing it again,
evaluation...).

The inference I think I draw from your friends' POV is that academics
are only rewarded for producing papers and NOT datasets. I think with
the increasing acceptance of data citation - producing excellent
datasets will be seen on a par with producing excellent papers.

Perhaps next time I shall elaborate more on this during my talk, and
less on the (high) standards of open data one should aspire too.

Many thanks for your comments Thomas.

R

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15 September 2011 11:11, Ross Mounce <ross.mounce at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Attendance (~interest?) was excellent. Despite there being many
>> parallel sessions on at the same time, the room was full-to-bursting,
>> every seat taken with 15+ standing around the edges of the room too.
>> Relative to attendance at an earlier session:
>
> Not entirely a fair comparison - the online science talks were a lunchtime
> workshop, so there were only a couple of other things running in parallel,
> while the regular talks had 9 sessions running at the same time.
>
> I chatted to one person about your talk later in the day, but she wasn't
> convinced. Essentially, the concern was 'What if we want to get further
> analysis & publications from the data?' I know this has come up before, but
> as you noted, your message was largely new to this audience. I think the
> 'Citation' section of the talk was probably the part that resonated most
> with the audience.
>
>> I noted many of the audience were taking notes with pen & paper... bit
>> ironic for such a 'digital' session IMO.
>
> Pen & paper haven't stopped working. ;-)
>
> Thanks for your talk,
> Thomas
>