Links

Konrad Forstner has a very interesting talk on what he sees as the future of scientific communication.

Nature runs a terrific blog, Nascent, which has frequent discussions of the future of science and scientific communication. Most scientific publishers have their head in the sand about the web. Nature, however, is innovating and experimenting in really interesting ways.

A few more: The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure, an open access collection of articles by people such as Paul Ginsparg (of arxiv.org), Timo Hannay (Nature), Tony Hey (Microsoft), and many others.

An interesting report by Jon Udell on the use of the web for scientific collaboration. It’s a bit dated in some ways, but in other ways remains very fresh.

Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) speculating on the future of science.

The Django Book, which is a nice example of a book (now published, I believe) that was developed in a very open style, with a web-based commenting s used to provide feedback to the authors as the book was written. I thought about doing something similar with my current book, but concluded that I don’t write in a linear enough style to make it feasible.

An article on open source science from the Harvard Business School.

Fullcodepress, a 24-hour event that’s happening in Sydney as I write. It’s a very cool collaborative project, where two teams are competing to build a fully functional website for a non-profit in 24 hours. Similar in concept to the Startup Weekends that are now springing up all over the place. What, exactly, can a group of human beings achieve when they come together and co-operate really intensively for 24 or 48 hours? Surprisingly much, seems to be the answer.

A thoughtful essay on the problems associated with all the social data people are now putting on the web. Starts from the (common) observation that it would be a lot more useful if it were more publicly available rather than locked up in places like Flickr, Amazon, Facebook, etc, and then makes many insightful observations about how to move to a more open system.

How to read a blog. This is a riff on one of my all-time favourite books, How to read a book, by Mortimer Adler.