World Association of Young Scientists

7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF YOUNG SCIENTISTS ON ENERGY ISSUES CYSENI 2010

May 27-28, 2010, Kaunas, Lithuania

Conference topics

1. Hydrogen and fuel cells
2. Renewable energy sources and their use
3. Smart energy networks
4. Energy efficiency and savings
5. Knowledges for energy policy making
6. Investigations in the fields of thermal physics, fluid mechanics and metrology
7. Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies, investigations on multifunction materials
8. Investigations of combustion and plasma processes
9. Global change and ecosystems
10. Fusion energy
11. Nuclear fission and radiation protection

Viait: http://www.cyseni.com/content/view/12/51/lang,en/

Two proposals for the Euroscience Open Forum 2010 have been submitted by Eurodoc and accepted on Nov 10, 2009:
"What would science look like if it were invented today? "
This will be a debate on how new communication tools such as wikis and other collaborative environments, blogs and microblogs can enrich scientific communication, how public post-publication peer review and contribution-based metrics can work. Special focus will be put on how young researchers can benefit from Open Access and Science 2.0 tools.
More information on the topic can be found here.

"New comparable data on young researcher's mobility patterns available: What are the consequences for European Research Policy?"

Logo or Venue image: 

The annual conference of Eurodoc, the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers provides a unique framework for young researchers to meet with European political and economical leaders and to engage in fruitful discussions on the construction of the European Research and Higher Education Areas. The conference is open for the general public, in particular all young researchers and policy makers are encouraged to participate.

Eurodoc 2010 will be embedded in a series of high-level events around the Bologna-Process Ministerial Summit. 150 to 200 young researchers and policy makers from more than 32 European countries are expected come to Vienna to engage in fruitful discussions and to work on recommendations for the future of research training beyond 2010.

Eurodoc-Survey

Next Euroscience Open Forum will take place on 2 to 7 of July, 2010 in Torino, Italy. I think it is the ideal forum to talk also about new science communciation tools.

That why I am proposing here a session on young researchers and Science 2.0. for the Career Programme of ESOF 2010.

We still need include names of interested experts to join the discussions with Second Life, Friendfeed or similar services in the proposal. The deadline for proposals for ESOF is September, 30.

The exact time within the frame of 2-7. July 2010 will be fixed later, taking into account the availabilities of the participants. It will be an one hour session. So is anybody interested to join the discussions?
w.

This is a comment on Open-process academic publishing, which I have read until here.

Content
-Good framing of the discussion, though at places lacking in references
-On "discussions in comments", see here and here.
-If you do not comment in detail on the "different discursive universe", you might as well shorten or delete that phrase.
-Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages, (1)
--A good reference on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics model is here.
-Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages, (3)
--Plagiarism detection already works quite well now, some tools are listed here.
-Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages, (4)
--On speeding up the publication process, see here (my comment).
-Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages, (5)
--The readership and even reputation of open-process publishers may increase, but "journals" in the sense we know them may well cease to exist (in fact, already now there is but one journal — the scientific literature), since the open-process handling of submissions will naturally focus on the article level (as long as these exist) and later perhaps on individual submissions to the global knowledge system, and be this a single wiki edit (e.g. via tools like WikiTrust). On incremental publishing, see here and here and here.

-Internal benefits for journals, general
--given my reservations on the last point, it may be worth considering to exchange the term "journal" for something else in this section (I used "public research environment"), which will obviously affect other aspects of the phrasing
-Internal benefits for journals, (1)
--on the feedback loop between productivity and recognition, see here.
-Internal benefits for journals, (4)
--Karma system in use at Slashdot may be relevant for this section, see here.

-Modular process: stages and states
--These stages fit well with text-based disciplines, but there may be more components (overview here)


Typos and phrasing
-production work . Still,
-John Wilibanks
-what i think ought to done
-publish and perish devaluing model. Model
-argument even more focused that those in an average 8000 paper are
-on whose work the organization relies on
-in-dept texts
(yes, I would like to subscribe)
-or at to have

"Fantasy Science Funding" is an online game played by people with concrete ideas about science funding who are not currently in a position to put these ideas into practice. There are five rules to the game: 1 - choose a funding body whose funds you are managing in your fantasy, 2 - imagine how their funds could be distributed to the benefit of science, 3 - choose areas of science to be "fired" (i.e. whose funding should be decreased with respect to present state), 4 - choose areas of science to be "hired" (where funding should be increased with respect to now), 5 - blog about it.

Previous shindings that I am aware of were hosted by Duncan Hull, Björn Brembs and Cameron Neylon.

The money is coming and yes, the stimulus money is on its way. However, in last week's Science Careers Magazine, there is an article that speaks about the concerns of unstable funding practices. (Please view this link) This week's article on clinicians 'making room for science' is also interesting, as the recent trends in requests for applications (RFAs) for building clinical investigative programs for MDs do not seem to address the fact that there are already plenty of PhDs capable of doing translatable science. Yes, there are the dual MD/PhD programs, whereby trainees work in the clinic and the lab, but if this is the future, then we should also consider that there may be competent PhDs who could also step over the fence into the clinical world. (I have been told that there are a few coursework MS degrees and that the NIH has some classes, but there needs to be more visibility.) While I understand that MDs can bring in reliable funds through their practices (and this is the bread and butter for bringing in a revenue stream), we must ask ourselves where the trainees in the biomedical sciences will go. Yesterday, Dr. Joan Schwartz (Asst. Director of the NIH) came to Yale and presented the campus to a number of grad students. I happened to stop by and ask: after the five year limit of being a postdoc at the NIH, where do the postdocs go? She couldn't tell me... 'there is no centralized mechanism for following our postdocs.' Keep in mind that the NIH has 3800 postdocs and about 10 times less graduate students on campus at any given time.

While I speak from knowing only what is going on in my area of biomedical research, we need to really understand the 'training path to career independence/ and if this model holds for the future. As with speaking with Shawn Lawrence Otto from ScienceDebate2008, the request for money in science is not a wise investment if 80% of the incoming grant money is directed to infrastructure and not the actual science, or those who populate the labs. (For some medical schools, this is indeed the case.) In the case of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA--money resultant from the stimulus), most of the RFAs are aimed at product development; for example "08-CA-107       Bioinformatic pipeline for rapid genomic analysis.  Development of bioinformatics tools  and analytical pipelines that will significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to analyze data from TCGA,  TARGET and other high throughput projects." Indeed, these specific RFAs are aimed at stimulating product creation, which can then be sold to generate revenue. The revenue generated from these activities needs to be partially reinvested in future experiments, which may be more risky, but potentially of high value. The rest of the money needs to be allocated for compensation, maintenance of facilities, diversified investment in other (non-scientific sectors), misc. liquid assets for the group, and finally, savings for building a reserve or endowment. The "seed" science must contribute to something that is of value, as without a sought need, the science on the other side may not be desirable. So what is the "seed" science? The ARRA certainly lays out a framework for this. A critical point of this is the transition from 'public tax payer money' to private company and the inflection point at which this happens/is monitored. In the same way that some have spoken about privatizing gains and socializing losses, we must think about the socializing of pilot, pre-clinical, and risky science and the privatizing of the 'useful/marketable' information, as it is filtered through trials and regulation. In short, to promote sustainable science, the initial funding needs to be directed toward projects are both "seed" science, as well as 'doable' and product/consumable-generating science. In an age of when consumption may not be seen in the best light, we can shift the ways in which full-circle (recycling products back to maker, almost like a lease) consumption takes place.

The Eurodoc 2009 conference

Innovations in Europe: From Academia to Practice and Back

The
annual Eurodoc conference took place from March 26 till March 28, 2009
in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. This major European gathering of young
researchers and policy makers was co-organised by ADS, the Slovak
Association of Doctorands, and SKRVŠ, the Czech Association of Doctoral
Candidates.
Eurodoc is the voice of doctoral candidates and young
researchers in Europe; it is a permanent partner of the European
Commission with regard to the European Research Area and the European
Higher Education. This year’s event was of significant importance since
for the first time in Eurodoc’s existence it was held in one of the new
member states of the European Union. The subject of this year’s
conference was ‘Innovations in Europe: From Academia to Practice and
Back’.  

Keynote speakers were the Slovak Republic’s Deputy Prime Minister for
Knowledge-Based Society Dušan Čaplovič, the General Director of the
Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic Peter Plavčan, the Deputy
Director-General of the DG Research of the European Commission Anneli
Pauli and Jean-Patrick Connerade, Emiritus Professor of the Imperial
College in London and well-known expert on the field of higher
education and research.
The Eurodoc delegates and other
participants discussed - during roundtables and workshops - policy
recommendations on ‘Doctoral Programmes in Europe – Their Role in a
Knowledge-Based Economy’, ‘Fostering Cooperation Between University and
Industry’, ‘Success Stories of Intersectorial Mobility - Doctoral
Candidates’ Views’, ’Lisbon Strategy and Innovation Policy within the
EU’ and ’The Role of Universities in the Innovative Economy’. The
conference finished with a plenary session in which also the impact of
the current world wide economic crisis on the funding of education and
research was discussed.  
The most important conclusion of the
conference is that in order to reach the Lisbon and Bologna aims
'action' is needed. The Member States and the institutions were
provided with a theoretical framework. It is up to them to put theory
into practice. However until now little of these improvements have been
implemented; only small steps have been taken and this in a fragmented
and random way. In order to achieve the aims of the Lisbon/Bologna
process, political will, political pressure and funding is needed.
Eurodoc
is determined to contribute to this process by, amongst others,
developing practical policies that can easily be adopted and
implemented like its ’Five Principles and Recommendations towards a
More Open European Labour Market for Researchers’.  

Moreover, to
make policy on doctoral researchers work, policy makers should know
what young researchers think and want. Thus it is of the utmost
importance that policy makers on all levels (local, regional, national,
and international) involve young researchers when drafting and
implementing policies that affect these young reseachers. This
conference re-assured the status of Eurodoc as key partner and main
voice of young researchers on the European level. Therefore we call on
the European Union to grant Eurodoc an even stronger position within
the the ERA and EHEA.  
The next Eurodoc Conference will take place
in Vienna on March 11-15, 2010. The conference theme will be
“Stocktaking and Prospects: Doctoral Training and Research – the Link
between EHEA and ERA”.   

The Eurodoc Annual General Meeting 2009
Banská Bystrica, Slovakia

At
the General Assembly, which took place directly after the annual
Eurodoc conference in Banská Bystrica (SK) a new Eurodoc board was
elected. The new President of Eurodoc is Nikola Macharová, doctoral
candidate at Nitra, Slovak Republic. Nikola, coming from a position in
the Slovak Doctorands Association’s board, is working on her doctoral
thesis on "Life Long Learning in Management of Cultural Institutions". 

The composition of the newly elected Board is the following: 
• President: Nikola Macharová (Slovakia) 
• Vice president: Nadia Koltcheva (Bulgaria) 
• Secretary: Elena Xeni (Cyprus) 
• Treasurer: Darius Köster (France) 
• General Board Member: Ing-Marie Ahl (Sweden) 
• General Board Member: Zaza Nadja Lee Hansen (Denmark) 
• General Board Member: Sverre Lundemo (Norway) 
The
most important aim of this year's Eurodoc board will be the
strengthening of the position of Eurodoc as well-recognised stakeholder
in the European Research Area and the European Higher Education Area by
representing the voice of Europe’s doctoral candidates and young
researchers. The General Assembly showed resolve by taking up a
resolution to the board to aim at the harmonisation of doctoral
programs across Europe. 
Currently, Eurodoc is conducting what can
be considered the most elaborate survey until now on the situation of
young researchers in Europe. The results will be presented at the
Eurodoc Conferece in 2010. Furthermore, the General Assembly agreed to
make a strong statement to claim the importance of investing into the
future by investing in education and research, also and especially in
times of economic crisis. 
The relevance of Eurodoc and of the
community it represents was witnessed by the increasing recognition of
young researchers as core stakeholders and partners in policy debates
and actions at the national and European level during the last period,
and is expected to rise significantly over the next years. 
The
next General Assembly will take place right after the Eurodoc
Conference on “Stocktaking and Prospects: Doctoral Training and
Research – the Link between EHEA and ERA”. It will take place in Vienna
on March 11-15, 2010.

Seen here:

"Becoming a Doctor of Philosophy, more commonly called PhD is a great challenge. It requires from a PhD student several years to be achieved and great dedication to obtain results and present them to the rest of the community. Obviously, it is worth it since what is at stake is the improvement of the knowledge in its field and being an active part of progress. In addition, being a PhD student means that one enters a prestigious university and lab and benefits from highly skilled people (namely tutors, professors). These very people who will be able to discuss, orientate and help the student on its way to PhD.

Because a PhD student isn’t that easy everyday, we have made a selection of PhD students blogs -but not only-that might result helpful. As it is shown in the great picture above, the ambition of a PhD may well decrease as years go by, or at least it is what a student can feel. Consequently, we hope you will have a nice and enlightening time reading and/or re-discovering them. Let’s get started!"

Are You a Green Talent?

In February 2009, the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education has launched an initiative to invite talented young researchers from throughout the world to visit the leading environmental technology location Germany. 

The 'Green Talents' competition under the patronage of Research Minister Dr. Annette Schavan addresses excellent young researchers and engineering scientists in the field of environmental technologies to apply for participation in the 'International Forum for High Potentials in Green Technologies'.

The International Forum will take place in August/September 2009. For one week, the selected participants will travel through Germany, visit leading universities, research institutes and companies, gather specific information about research activities on site and learn about the possibilities of cooperating with German partners. Individual meetings with experts and the presentation of their own research will be part of the forum - as well as a cultural program and a meeting with Minister Dr. Annette Schavan as a special highlight.

APPLY NOW for a seat on the Green Talents International Forum, if you want to meet Germany's leading environmental scientists and get to know one of the world's largest technology exporters.

Further information on the competition and an application guideline are provided on the 'Green Talents' website http://www.research-in-germany.de/greentalents.

Please give this information also to other interested persons.

Contact:
Dr. Marion Mienert, International Bureau of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research; e-mail: greentalents@research-in-germany.de  

Eurodoc is conducting a Europe-wide survey on doctoral researchers in cooperation with the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at Kassel University. The survey will be open at least till end of April.
Its topics include qualification requirements, career paths, funding schemes, models of training and supervision, working conditions, expected and achieved results of scientific work and mobility.

This is the first survey of its kind and roughly 100,000 doctoral researchers from the whole of Europe are asked to take part in this study. Be one of them – add your experience to our knowledge and contribute to forming of the European Research Area. We thank you in advance for your valued cooperation. Here is the link

If you are not a European doctoral candidate, you can still help this important project for young researchs - just send the message to all European doctoral candidates you know!

Young researchers of the Institute of Endemic Diseases conference was held in the Nile Colledge, Omdurman, Sudan, 17th - 18th Jan 2009. The organizers were: Sudanese National Academy of Sciences (SNAS), Institute of Endmic Diseases (IEND) and the Nile Colledge, and Sudanese Academy of Young Scientists (SAYS). About fifty papers in different research fields were presented.

Just imagine if all authors currently writing up manuscripts about a subject were instead to coordinate their efforts by collaborating on a single but detailed and balanced citable reference in which the topic would be described in and linked to all relevant contexts, updated as new research results pass peer review.

Since the advent of printed scholarly periodicals in the late Middle Ages, context in scientific communication has mainly been established by providing each of these publication venues (now collectively referred to as journals) with a scope, typically in terms of topics or methods covered, or with respect to a perceived threshold in newsworthiness.

Besides establishing context, the scope also defined the audience -- and thus indirectly the number of printed copies, their pricing and their distribution amongst individuals and institutions -- as well as criteria to be met by manuscripts in order to be considered for publication. Given the scope of a particular journal, consequently, knowledge about specialist terms (which may describe completely non-congruent concepts in different fields), methodologies, notations, mainstream opinions, trends or major controversies could reasonably be expected to be widespread amongst the audience, which reduced the need of redundantly repeating the same things all over and again. Interestingly, redundancy is still quite visible nonentheless, especially in the introductory, methods and discussion sections and the abstracts, often in a way characteristic of the authors (such that services like eTBLAST and JANE can make qualified guesses on authors of a particular piece of text, with good results if some of the authors have a lot of papers in the respective database, mainly PubMed, and if they have not changed their individual research scope too often in between).

Of course, there would be side effects: A manuscript well-adapted to the scope of one particular journal is often not very intelligible to someone outside its intended audience, which hampers cross-fertilization with other research fields (we will get back to this below). When using paper as the sole medium of communication, there is not much to be done about this limitation, and we got so used to it that few indeed would perceive it as a limitation at all. However, the times when paper alone reigned over scholarly communication have certainly passed.

So, in principle, the online version of a manuscript could link directly to any appropriate source of information (even blogs, for that matter, if no better source is available or accessible; see here for an example) but in current practice, linking is usually achieved paper-style, i.e. indirectly, via a list of references which itself is often not linked to online versions (let alone openly accessible ones) of the references in question, even though Uniform Resource Identifiers like DOI and SRef have been around for about a decade now, and International Standard Book Numbers longer still.

The above-mentioned hampered cross-field fertilization is crucial with respect to interdisciplinary research projects, digital libraries and multi-journal (or indeed cross-disciplinary) bibliographic search engines (e.g. Google Scholar), since these dramatically increased the likelihood of, say, a biologist stumbling upon a not primarily biological source relevant to her research (think shape quantification or growth curves, for instance). What options do we have to integrate these cross-disciplinary hidden treasures with the traditional intra-disciplinary background knowledge?

Interestingly, lack of context is also a consistent feature of most "Facebooks for scientists" (including ways.org which hosts this blog) - in fact, the whole set of scholarly pages on the www is the appropriate network for researchers but so far it is not optimally connected, particularly because formal scholarly communication has not yet fully hatched from the structures it had during the paper-based era (see also this nice overview of the current situation). Just imagine if all authors currently writing up manuscripts about a subject were instead to coordinate their efforts by collaborating on a single but detailed and balanced citable reference in which the topic would be described in and linked to all relevant contexts, updated as new research results pass peer review. Of course, this would shift the focus away from periodicals (and, in passing, render things like a journal's scope and Impact Factor superfluous), which is likely to meet resistance from the publishing establishment.

Groupware comes to mind in this regard, and wikis in particular: They allow to aggregate and inter-link diverse sets of knowledge in an online-accessible manner, basically for free. The by now classical example are the Wikipedias, and one scientific journal - RNA biology - has already announced that it requires an introductory Wikipedia article for papers it is to publish on RNA families, an idea that recently spurred an ongoing debate on the merits of such an initiative and of doing it with Wikipedia.

An investigation (video lecture by Bill Wedemeyer here, my brief annotation here) of the quality of a set of science articles in the English Wikipedia is currently being written up for classical paper-style publication but the preliminary results indicate that "[t]here is a subset of reliably helpful science articles on the English Wikipedia for outreach, teacher training, and general science education" (slide shown at 29:35min in the video). However, the distribution of the set of articles was skewed towards the Good Article and Featured Article classes which constituted only 2% of the English Wikipedia at the time of investigation, and it did not include articles in the humanities (they come next).

Furthermore, the larger Wikipedias have a serious problem with vandalism: take an article of your choice and look in its history page for reverts - most of them will be about changes like this or worse. This is less of an issue with more popular topics for which large numbers of volunteers may be available to correct spammy entries but it is probably fair to assume that most researchers value their time too much to spend it on repeatedly correcting such information if it had already been correctly entered once. Other problems with covering scientific topics at Wikipedia include the notability criteria which have to be fulfilled to avoid an article being deleted, and the rejection of "original research" in the sense of not having been peer reviewed before publication. Peer review is indeed an important aspect of scholarly communication, as it paves the way towards the reproducibility that forms one of the foundations of modern science. Yet I know of no compelling reason to believe that it works better before than after publication (doing it beforehand was just a practical decision in times when journal space was measured in paper pages).

Fortunately, the Wikipedias are not the only wikis around, and amongst the more scholarly inclined alternatives, there are even a number of wiki-based journals, though usually with a very narrow scope and/ or a low number of articles. On the contrary, Citizendium, Scholarpedia (which has classical peer review and an ISSN and may thus be counted as a wiki journal, too), OpenWetWare and the Wikiversities are cross-disciplinary and structured (as well as sized, for the moment) such that vandalism and notability are not really a problem (with minor exceptions, real names are required at the first three, and anybody can write about anything, particularly their fields of expertise). None of these is even close to providing the vast amount of context existing in the English Wikipedia but they might perhaps if the latter were broken down to scholarly useful stuff, as discussed above. Out of these four wikis, only OpenWetWare and some Wikiversities (here counted as one) currently allow for original research to be published on their site - in the case of OpenWetWare, this is indeed the main purpose.

Further, a number of more specialized scholarly wikis exist (e.g. WikiGenes, the Encyclopedia of Earth, the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, or the Dispersive PDE Wiki) which can teach us about the usefulness of wikis within specific academic fields. I will not dwell on details here but instead list a number of features I deem desirable for future scholarly wikis, derived from experience with existing ones. These include, in no particular order:

• search engines that integrate or otherwise compare favourably with major scholarly search engines on the web (the already mentioned Google Scholar and PubMed as well as, say, the BioText Search Engine that searches Open Access text and images)
  
• pan-disciplinary scope, with consistent disambiguation of specialist terms (mainly but not fully achieved at Citizendium)
• some system of peer review (basically, any wiki allows to leave comments, annotations or formal reviews on talk pages of users or articles but these ratings should be featured more prominently; templates like those visualizing article status at Citizendium may help with that); this may be as simple as disallowing individuals to add information to Citizendium when the only available support is their own non-reviewed research published at OpenWetWare - the real name policy will minimize misuse
  
• the uploadability of all kinds of media (including videos, which are blocked at the Wikipedias but allowed at Citizendium, for instance, and the scope of the Journal of Visualized Experiments) that traditionally (if you can call a habit that barely is a decade old a tradition already) went along with paper-based publications as "supporting online information" (which would be easily integrated in an all-online article with no sharp space limitations)
  
• stable versions for contents that has undergone peer review (like the Approved Articles at Citizendium), along with draft versions for anything else (including improvements to and updates of previous stable versions); like any non-protected page at the Wikipedias, these draft versions can serve as a playground, though a real-name policy would probably make it a more educational one
  
• a separate namespace for references (already in use at the Dispersive PDE Wiki and the French Wikipedia, in test at Citizendium); as a side line, this would open up ways for new citation metrics, via the What links here function
  
• attributability of contributions (automatically realized, though not in the traditional scholarly way, in any wiki with a real name policy like that at Citizendium, via the User contributions function; special arrangements exist at Scholarpedia and WikiGenes; OpenWetWare does allow nicknames but real names prevail; the Wikiversities have basically the same user name policy as the Wikipedias)
• easy download of selected sets of pages for local archiving by individual researchers
  
• licenses that allow unrestricted reuse and derivative work if the original source is properly acknowledged (typically CC-by-SA or the older GFDL, both of which are hopefully going to be compatible soon)
• resource-effective design (see also discussions on the energy use of the internet and individual websites)
• integration with the non-scholarly world (certainly achieved in the Wikipedias and Citizendium), particularly with students (cf. the Eduzendium initiative at Citizendium) and non-English contents
  
• automation of the formatting, as already common in non-wiki environments, e.g. with LaTeX templates (none of the wikis I know comes close to that, albeit templates are heavily used at the various Wikipedias and, to a lesser extent but in a more consistent manner, at Citizendium; they seem to be rather rarely used on smaller or more specialized wikis); the same applies to references, though automated wikificationhas already progressed considerably here, despite the lack of wiki export functions at publisher's sites (or of suitable XML-to-wiki converters for those who provide XML)
  

One of the most useful templates in use at Citizendium is that for subpages (open the Biology article in a separate window to see what this is about) :  

• The article's main page is a stable version, approved by an author with expertise in that field
• Next comes the Talk tab that leads to the discussion page, as per default in any wiki
  
• the Draft tab leads to the editable version (this only applies for articles that have already been approved; in others, the main page is editable)
• the Related Articles tab roughly corresponds to "see also" in the Wikipedias but is more usefully structured for navigation and somewhat replaces the categories which are heavily used in Wikipedia but only to a limited extent at Citizendium
• there are further subpages: Bibliography for further reading, External Links, Gallery, Video and so on

It is interesting to see that these individual subpages largely complement existing social networking tools and have thus the potential to replace them (or to be replaced by them), at least for scholarly purposes:

• the Bibliography subpage is a context-based alternative to CiteULike, Zotero, BibSonomy and other reference managers, possibly in conjunction with Open Library, scholarly search engines and tools like Scribd or Papers. One problem wikis cannot solve is that of access to paper-based research publications but due to the current spread of Green and Gold Open Access initiatives, this is likely to change in the next few years anyway.
  
• the External Links subpage is a context-based alternative to conventional social bookmarking as known from delicious and simpy 
• Additional subpages could be tailored to meet the needs of individual categories of articles (e.g. properties of chemical elements, genes, stellar constellations etc.) or more general scholarly needs (e.g. peer review, slides, code, protocols, or bot-generated transcripts from video lectures)

Besides, User pages may provide context-based alternatives to individual pages at different networking sites, and possibly even to blogs like this one, while the Recent changes page could turn into an alternative for friendfeed, with items on your Watchlist (if you are logged in) equivalent to friendfeed rooms or personal feeds you are subscribed to. For the record, this social networking component of Citizendium has already been discussed two years ago, prior to its official launch and thus at a time when many of its current structures and their implications were not known yet.

Finally, and importantly, the easy availability of context (once the system would be reasonably well adopted by scholarly communities, and the encyclopedic corpus thus reasonably complete) would make it more easy to guide expert attention and thus to identify obvious gaps in current knowledge (e.g. by means of an expert evaluation of items listed on the Most Wanted page), and science funders could then issue a call for research proposals on such topics (e.g. via a Calls subpage, InnoCentive, Mechanical Turk or by more traditional means). And while we are at it, I think science funders, job committees and review panels would profit from familiarizing themselves with the workings of wikis, particularly the aspects relevant to reliability, attribution, and outreach (your organization, company or university probably has a page on Wikipedia - take a look at it, along with its history and talk pages, and you will almost certainly find something to improve).

To sum up, the still fledgling Citizendium currently seems to be the closest match for a cross-disciplinary scholarly wiki anchored in the real world, and independent of whether it will allow original research to be posted in the future or not, this essential function in scholarly communication can be fulfilled by OpenWetWare (indeed, a similar separation of powers is one of the most healthy elements of most democracies). If widely adopted, this would entail a major shift in the way research is being done and communicated, towards what has come to be known as open science. As a side effect, commercial publishers would have to look for new things to publish, other than original research (non-commercial publishers like scholarly societies may, after the usual period of resistance, see more advantages than disadvantages in the groupware model). Reviews at different levels of expertise may be one option, and tutorials or other learning tools another but all this could be done via some intelligently structured set of groupware, too, depending on the incentives involved (in fact, such reviews are the scope of Scholarpedia). A side effect for researchers would be that they could use the author fees, page and figure charges and all the other money currently required to publish a paper for other purposes.

Of course, there are potential problems with such an enormous concentration of knowledge (e.g. for attacks and misuse, especially in relation to an international author identification that is currently being discussed). The obvious solutions are appropriate mirroring and otherwise transparency. Similar concerns would apply to a journal like PLoS ONE that does not have a scope in the traditional paper-limited sense mentioned above, yet two years after launch, it is doing pretty well, and my guess is that if it were to adopt a symbiosis with a suitable wiki in a way similar to the RNA Biology initiative, it may even do better.

As a next step, I wish to go into more detail concerning the relative merits of paper-based and wiki-based scholarly communication. So I started a Wikiversity page on wikis in scholarly communication and invite you to add to it (I chose Wikiversity such that those who object to real name policies may make their voice heard, too, and I think I can deal with spam should it arise there). This overview may also help in working out an ecological footprint scheme applicable to research, as described previously.

I dedicate this post to my granny who passed away last week.

The Permafrost Young Researchers Network (PYRN) is proud to announce the
release of the latest version of its bibliography, PYRN-Bib. PYRN-Bib is
a synthesizing international bibliographical database aiming at
collecting and distributing information on all theses submitted for
earning a scientific degree in permafrost-related research.



It can be reached at:

http://pyrn.ways.org/resources/pyrn-bib-permafrost-bibliography



PYRN-Bib currently hosts 916 entries and is offered in different file
formats: tagged Endnote library, XML, BibTex, PDF.

PYRN-Bib is hosted by the Permafrost Young Researchers Network
(http://pyrn.ways.org), an international network of early career
students and young scientists in permafrost related research with
currently 581 members (2008-10-27). PYRN-Bib is also published under the
patronage of the International Permafrost Association (IPA,
http://www.ipa-permafrost.org).

PYRN-Bib is a comprehensive database that includes all degree-earning
theses (e.g. Diploma, Ph.D., Master, etc.), coming from any country and
any scientific field, under the single condition that the thesis is
strongly related to research on permafrost and/or periglacial processes.

It attempts at referencing buried sources of information including
theses published in languages other than English. It is completely open
and can be searched and exported online (e.g. as Endnote format)

The PYRN-Bib database is growing rapidly and is accepting new entries
related to permafrost research. You can submit new entries at:
http://pyrn.ways.org/node/add/biblio or simply by contacting Guido
Grosse (ggrosse@gi.alaska.edu). Large amounts of citation information
(in any database or non-database format) can be submitted at once by
contacting us before hand. Any submission (small or large) is welcome.

You can reference the bibliography it using the following information:



Grosse, G., Lantuit, H.(2008). PYRN-Bib 3.2: The Permafrost Young
Researchers Network Bibliography of Permafrost-Related Theses,
Permafrost Young Researchers Network, 3.2, 72 pp.
http://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.31101



More information on PYRN-Bib and the methods and criteria used to
compile the references can be found in the companion paper:
http://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.31101



Guido Grosse, Hugues Lantuit

This post is meant as a contribution to Open Access Day (OA day) which strives to raise awareness - amongst researchers, research funders, academic publishers, students, politicians and the public - of the importance of Open Access (to literature containing peer-reviewed results of scientific investigations, that is) for our global society.

One way to do this is to have people like you blog in synchronization, i.e. on four questions during OA day. To give you some inspiration on the topic, you may wish to take a look at the first such synch-blogging entry, which came from Neil Saunders, based at the University of Queensland, Australia.

I will follow Neil's formatting to address the four questions:

1. Why does Open Access matter to you?

OA, for me, marks a turning point within the scientific cycle, i.e. the iterative process which leads (if sufficiently funded) from a research question or idea to a hypothesis or new method that can be tested and, ultimately, to the results of those tests which then have to be communicated. This communication step is crucial, as it adds to our global knowledge foundation (often described, following Newton, as "the shoulders of giants") for new research questions or ideas that may eventually lead to things like "innovation", "insight" and "progress". If innovators-to-be, however, do not have access to the findings of their forebears (which may indeed be contemporaries), they will have to spend a lot of their time and resources by (re)inventing some aspects of the giants' shoulders before starting to work on their innovations in the first place. Open Access is a movement to lift those access barriers, and it is not only useful to researchers but it can also, for instance, help patients and their relatives to gather first-hand expert information on their specific health conditions, and it can help to inform public debates about research data with scientific implications. The full power of Open Access, however, can only be harvested if all other steps  within the scientific cycle (including, e.g., notebook keeping) also become increasingly open, a goal with multiple names (of which Open Science is my favourite). This would not only reduce the considerable time lag between the obtainment of some results and their application in other circumstances but also foster the development of new citation metrics that would allow to more adequately evaluate the research accomplishments of young scientists.


2. How did you first become aware of it?

I had been aware of the barriers since I started reading scientific papers in the mid-1990s, as I rarely had access to much of the literature cited therein, no matter what library I went to (and I went to more than a dozen regularly at that time). I got a glimpse of a possible solution when checking out the freely available content at BioMed Central on a weekly basis some years later but this again did not cover much of my core areas of interest (Evolutionary Biophysics), nor did arxiv.org that I had discovered around the same time. So it took the Budapest Open Access Initiative to make me aware of the progress that had already been achieved or was underway by 2001, and I signed it shortly after starting to work on my PhD thesis.


3. Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?

Knowledge grows when shared. And what else is the goal of research if not growing knowledge on a global scale? Besides, I find it non-sustainable to use the limited resources that we have to constantly re-invent the wheel for reasons external to the research process.


4. What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

As an author, I strive to publish OA (i.e. gold) but independent of whether this is possible or not, I self-archive my papers (i.e. green OA). I am neither a journal editor nor part of a publishing house but I occasionally use my blog to cover OA and related topics, particularly Open Education, and Open Science as a whole, and I link to others who do this more intensively. Finally, I am playing around with platforms and technologies that may facilitate the transition to a more open scientific cycle, keeping a special eye on what these upcoming changes might mean to young scientists, e.g. in terms of theses and online lectures rather than papers. Others can, of course, familiarize themselves with the issue of effectively (in both time and resources) communicating (peer-reviewed) research results via the channels that are technically possible, they can experiment with the tools at hand to communicate their thoughts, and they can educate even more others about these matters in more traditional ways. In fact, I think they should.