Next Generation Science

Graham Steel (FriendFeed: McDawg) has started a contact list for people who are directly or indirectly affiliated and/or associated with Open Science. He discussed the reason for an Open Science Contact List yesterday on his blog. Although his focus in on the Life Sciences, people from other disciplines are also welcome. If you’re such an individual, add you name to the list.

I first discovered Biostar, a StackExchange for bioinformatics, computational genomics and systems biology, via a post of Deepak’s (FriendFeed: mndoci) back in March: BioStar – A bioinformatics stackexchange. I’ve been meaning to use it, but with the job change and move, I just haven’t had time. It’s similar to the Life Scientists room on FriendFeed, although obviously more focused on Q & A.

Part Digg, part forum, part blog and part wiki, StackExchange is a place to get expert answers to your questions. Today, I stumbled across Meta StackExchange, a forum to ask questions about StackExchange itself. Scanning down the page, I saw the question “Proposal for Physical Computing StackExchange” and thought to myself, “Oh, that’s interesting, you can create smaller, more focused groups.”

Little did I know … those focused groups are called “Stacks” and there’s a number of them, several of which revolve around science.

Just yesterday, Andrew Perry (FriendFeed: pansapiens) wrote about StackExchange Sites for Science. He briefly reviewed a couple of them and linked to a list of science-related StackExchanges. I was interested in the Neuroknowledge stack until I saw all the spam. Hopefully, Stack Exchange 2.0 with it’s new site creation process and Creative Commons licensing will address the problem.

Scientific research today no longer happens in a vacuum. Networking technologies and online resources such as StackExchange are helping to increase the pace of scientific communication, scholarship and progress in the digital age. It’s truly an exciting time for networked science.

The Panton Principles for Open Data in Science and the Is It Open Data? web service launched today.

From the Panton Principles preamble:

Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.

For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.

By open data in science we mean that it is freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. To this end data related to published science should be explicitly placed in the public domain.

The Panton Principles were authored by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK – with input from the Working Group on Open Data in Science.

You can review and endorse the principles at http://www.pantonprinciples.org

The Is It Open Data? web service allows anyone to make and publicly record an enquiry into the openness of a scientific dataset.