Uncommon Ground

Uncommon Ground

Monthly Archive: August 2016

Wellcome Trust establishes Open Research

The Wellcome Trust just announced that it will launch a new publishing platform for scientists who receive support from Wellcome (https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/wellcome-launch-bold-publishing-initiative). Work published through Wellcome Open Research will be open access, and Wellcome will cover all article processing charges.

Wellcome Open Research will use services developed by F1000Research  to make research outputs available faster and in ways that support reproducibility and transparency. It will enable Wellcome grantees to publish a wide variety of outputs from standard research articles and data sets, through to null and negative results.

The platform will use a model of immediate publication followed by transparent invited peer review, with inclusion of supporting data, enabling researchers to reanalyse, replicate and reuse the data, all of which will help to improve the reproducibility and reliability of the research it publishes.

Once articles pass peer review, they will be indexed in major bibliographic databases and deposited in PubMed Central and Europe PMC. Wellcome Open Research will disseminate results almost immediately, ensuring critical advances in urgent areas of research are not held up by lengthy journal processes.

Hat tip: Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, STAT.

August 10, 2016 Scholarly publishing 0 Read more >

Science communication and experts

Michael_Gove_at_Policy_Exchange_delivering_his_keynote_speech_'The_Importance_of_Teaching'_(cropped)In early June, Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom. (Image at left By Policy Exchange [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) He helped lead the effort that lead to the vote for the UK to leave the European Union. He appeared on a Sky News program where he “refused to name any economists who back Britain’s exit from the European Union, saying that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’.” (https://next.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c) While Gove was speaking about economists, his words have clear implications for scientists. Being expert isn’t enough. Commanding the facts isn’t enough. I’m no expert, but this strikes me as a pretty good example of why the “deficit model” of science communication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model) is wrong.

Writing in EoS, Amy Luers and David Kroodsma have some good advice. Don’t report facts. Join conversations. Here are a few of the key points:

  • Science communicators need to focus on developing strategies to join and initiate conversations that start with people, not science.
  • Credibility is determined more by the communities scientists are associated with than by the papers they publish.
  • Scientists should embrace the fact that online communities enable people to come together and collaborate, and use this to identify new opportunities for coproduction of knowledge that can complement more conventional science communication efforts.

August 8, 2016 Science communication 0 Read more >

Summary of tweeting from #Botany2016

Twitter activity for #Botany2016 has declined now that the conference has been over for a couple of days.

Botany-2016-tweets

Spirts remained high throughout the runup to the conference, dipping below zero only once about a week before everyone arrived.

Botany-2016-sentiment

@JChrisPires contributed a larger number of tweets (including tweets of others that he retweeted) than anyone else,

Botany-2016-tweeters-cumulative

but @uribe_convers had a larger impact, regardless of whether you measure impact in number of retweets

Botany-2016-impact

or in terms of number of likes

Botany-2016-likes

If you’d like to play around with the code, it’s available in Github: https://github.com/kholsinger/Twitter-stats.

August 7, 2016 Botany 0 Read more >

I’m back

The PC on which darwin was running blew up a couple of weeks ago. I’m in the process of reconstructing what I can, but it’s going to take a while. I’m not likely to recover old posts. Sorry about that.

August 3, 2016 Miscellaneous 0 Read more >