User talk:OpenScientist/What would science look like if it were invented today

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Purpose of this page[edit]

This version of the page is a blog post-to-be for the June 2009 issue of the Euroscientist. It is the first part (focusing on knowledge creation) in a set of two posts dedicated to the future of science. Part II will focus on the structuring of knowledge, and you are warmly invited to join. For comments, please go here. Further textbits discarded during writing are here. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 10:18, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Part II: What would knowledge structuring look like if it were invented today?[edit]

Some of the points to consider (this is an evolving list of keyword and links to relevant concepts):

see also Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

Related posts not cited in article yet[edit]

related: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
discussed, for example, here
discussed here
see also A question of trust
"science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It's just a really, really inefficient one - the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate the existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one-to-three new assertions made in any one paper."
"Data management should be woven into every course in science."
also bring in Kleiner's speech
mention that doing science funding in public would also reduce the possibility to game the system by exaggerating one's own contributions to science in grant applications
ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Wiki technology has become a ubiquitous mechanism for dissemination of information, and places strong emphasis on collaboration. We aimed to leverage wiki technology to allow small groups of researchers to collaborate around a specific domain, for example a biological pathway. Automatically gathered seed data could be modified by the group and enriched with domain specific information. RESULTS: We describe a software system, BioKb, implemented as a plugin for the TWiki engine, and designed to facilitate construction of a field-specific wiki containing collaborative and automatically generated content. Features of this system include: query of publicly available resources such as KEGG, iHOP and MeSH, to generate 'seed' content for topics; simple definition of structure for topics of different types via an administration page; and interactive incorporation of relevant PubMed references. An exemplar is shown for the use of this system, in the the creation of the RAASWiki knowledgebase on the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS). RAASWiki has been seeded with data by use of BioKb, and will be the subject of ongoing development into an extensive knowledgebase on the RAAS. CONCLUSIONS: The BioKb system is available from http://www.bioinf.mvm.ed.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/BioKbPlugin as a plugin for the TWiki engine.
quote: "One can draw an analogy between pre-internet academia and pre-industrial manufacturing. Before the industrial revolution, manufacturing was the province of individual craftsmen or of secretive guilds, working painstakingly on each individual piece of work, with each master passing down their carefully hoarded insights and tricks to just a handful of disciples. It is not hard to find parallels to each of these phenomena in academia.

But after the industrial revolution, specialisation and mass production became the paradigm in manufacturing; less intimate, surely, but also vastly more efficient and reliable. One might bemoan the loss of creativity and individuality that each craftsman exhibited, but eventually, as the industrial revolution matured into the modern era, the outlets for creativity became dispersed to a wider group of people. Thanks to division of labour, design, invention, entrepreneurship, manufacturing, marketing, training, or management could now be performed by whoever was best qualified to do each, rather than by the same individual; and the best practices in each of these areas could be adopted widely, rather than being confined to their originator and a select number of followers.

Could it be that the internet will ignite the analogue of the industrial revolution for academia?"

talk:talk:[edit]

Very interesting. If you make this discussion about part 2 its own page it will have its own talk page... I feel funny about leaving comments here :) what about changes to the process of developing and assessing a hypothesis in the first place? It's seems a bit of a historical quirk to me that the same group is expected to declare a hypothesis, define a methodology, carry out that methodology and assess errors, and evaluate the results / convert into a conclusion... Lemuel Akins

Hi Lemuel, I hope it's fun to leave comments here, yet I fail to see why it should be funny (though I'm glad if it works out that way for you). The changes you mention were implicit in my text and covered in more detail by Michael Nielsen at Micropublication and open source research (listed in the above section), which I intend to incorporate more explicitly into the second part. Feel free to edit as you see fit! --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 10:24, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
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