Significant Science

One of the great pleasures of attending ScienceOnline earlier this year was that I finally got to meet Sol Lederman of the Federated Search Blog.

During our chat (which came about via the gentlemanly assistance of Walter Jessen) Sol mentioned that his brother Abe Lederman of Deep Web Technologies was working in conjunction with the Office of Scientific & Technical Information (OSTI) of the U. S. Department of Energy, Microsoft Research and others on what has recently launched as Multilingual WorldWideScience, which Abe discusses here.

Now I care deeply about the Open Science, Open Access and Open Data movements and I have been a bit puzzled by the low profile of search in much of the discussion of those movements. As interest grows among funders of medical research (note the presence of representatives of disease advocacy groups, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and government officials among the presenters of the upcoming Open Science Summit 2010) in the growth of Open Science and given that they might start making their support of researchers conditional on the agreement of grantees to conduct their research according to the tenets of Open Science whenever possible or at the least to agree upfront to deposit all of their results in PubMed Central or other public repositories there is going to be an explosion in the amount of data and medical literature that is going to have to be searched.

And given that the Obama administration is very strongly in favor of rendering as much of the vast store of government data and results of government-financed research as accessible to the general public and scientific community as possible (see the PDFs of much of this discussion of earlier this year here) search is going to become ever more crucial—and not just with American material. As China and countries such as Brazil and Turkey take off economically their scientific contributions will grow as well. And much of that wealth of knowledge is not in English.

That is why I found the slide show Multilingual WorldWideScience: Accelerating Discovery through Multilingual Translations by the director of  OSTI, Walter L. Warnick, surprisingly moving, inspiring and not at all dry.

As someone who grew up in a family that housed students who had left home and family in China, Japan, Iran, Korea and other countries to study engineering, chemistry, physics, biochemistry and so on at Oregon State University here in my hometown of Corvallis, Oregon I know what brilliant people there are in many countries who have so much to offer and what a boon it will be that the work of researchers worldwide will become useable to each of them and benefit the rest of us.

Dr. Warnick makes some simple but important points.

For example, he says in his slideshow,

Corollary 1:  Scientific discovery can be accelerated by accelerating access to worldwide scientific information.

The case for WorldWideScience.org.

Corollary 2:  Multilingual translations of science will further accelerate scientific discovery.

The case for Multilingual WorldWideScience.org

I have recently lost a friend to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and I would often sadly reflect as I bicycled home from her house about the glacial pace of progress on research on that disease and others like it. That is why I find Dr. Warnick’s enthusiasm and practical accomplishments so very admirable and the best possible case for paying one’s taxes with a minimal amount of grumbling. He is putting federal funds to exemplary use.

Dr. Warnick talks of “The “Accelerating” Power of WorldWideScience.org” and goes on to discuss problems that are now being addressed:

Overcoming the researcher’s practical limitations:

Not knowing “what’s out there.” (examples:  Korean medical journals, Australian Antarctic data, South African scientific research database)

Inadequate time to search scientific databases one by one. (examples:  UK PubMed Central, Ginsparg’s arXiv.org)

Inability to sort compiled results by relevance.

By filling these gaps, WorldWideScience.org has accelerated access to scientific information.

He adds,

To further accelerate access to science, multilingual translations are needed in both directions

Translation of English content for non-English speakers and translation of non-English content for English speakers

He concludes, “With the launch of Multilingual WorldWideScience.org, we are . . .

Opening vast reservoirs of heretofore under-utilized scientific knowledge

Providing equal access to science for anyone on the Internet

Promoting scientific collaboration, participation, and transparency

. . . and accelerating scientific discovery!”

Not a bad day’s work!

Kudos to all involved in Multilingual WorldWideScience. This is a real model of government-industry and international cooperation and a major contribution to the advancement of science and the betterment of the human condition. Sorry for getting so misty-eyed, but this really is a stupendous achievement.

As the many worlds of Open Science, Open Access, Open Research and Research 2.0 (check out the  superb slideshow Virtual Research Networks: Towards Research 2.0 for insights into how much of this data is being generated) develop Multilingual WorldWideScience will be there to make all of this activity quite literally intelligible to anyone with an Internet connection.