[open-science] Thoughts on Having a Meta Open Science Community

Thu Oct 2 05:26:41 UTC 2014

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Bill Mills <mills.wj at gmail.com> wrote:
> But a big
> firehose aggregator might help do an even better job of what you describe;
> DJing open science is a big job in itself, and might be made more convenient
> (==realistic) if the author could periodically survey the landscape from
> just one planet.

This discussion got me thinking as I've always struggled to manually
parse data the spider pulls for the the 'exact' information I seek at
any point in time and because the word 'Science' encompasses many
sub-fields, with many cross-linkages across multiple sub-domains, it
can be very interesting, but overwhelming too. Here are two scenarios
for which I could not find a solution:

1. For example, if a blogger tags a post with "HMM", she could be
writing about "Heavy meromyosin", "Hidden Markov models" or "Human
malignant melanoma" which can have a parent category of Biochemistry,
Statistics (but some may argue that HMM can be used in bioinformatics
and other "science" research), and "Cancer Research" (say, genetics,
epidemiology, cell biology, etc..), respectively.  How would a single
firehose aggregator with a few "specialist" authors filter this
mountain of information and would'nt the information flood, despite
the tags for all things 'science' or 'meta open science', quickly
overwhelm subscribers?

2. Secondly, there are some researchers and scientists who refuse to
blog for whatever reason - sometimes its sheer lack of time, lack of
interest in blogging, whatever...; and yet they have a body of work to
back them up.  How do you get to hear their voices as opposed to the
louder and more vocal folks? Unfortunately, most of the SN tools only
end up promoting the most narcissistic self-promoting personalities,
not necessarily 'science'. This is something to think about before we
obsess over the tools - what is the goal and how can we use the tool
to achieve it while promoting 'science' per se!

/my zero paise worth,
SVAKSHA ॥  http://about.me/svaksha  ॥