Therefore, I have decided to pretty much leave blogging for Twitter.  See you there. I am hleman on Twitter.

Thanks for dropping by here!

As I often do when at conferences, I reflect on how lucky I am to have attended that particular one and think about what those in other professions might benefit from attending it.

For instance, I belong to that that strange species, the librarian without a library. That is, I work for a center for health research and quality as a research information technologist and think of myself as a librarian but spend a great deal of time in the land of Web development and working on the free services for those in the health sciences, ResearchRaven and and ScanGrants. 

Because I work on tools for researchers and students in the health sciences, I have to hustle (which entails sitting and writing about myself to an excessive extent in the wee hours) to keep up on what is going across a range of fields such as basic science, clinical research, disease advocacy, the use of the Web in healthcare, Web science and science on the Web/online science (the first being the  study of how people use the Web and the second being how science is being done on the Web) , public health, disability research, information science, community health and public policy.   And that is just a partial list.

And I can’t think of organization that possesses such a wealth of talent, provides such a range of services and gets so much done vis-à-vis health policy and disease advocacy level at the national health levels and in terms of moral support for its diverse membership as the Genetic Alliance.

Its membership encompasses sizable disease advocacy groups with large staffs and fairly robust budgets to tiny ones run on a shoestring by the devoted family members of those with a disease so rare that only a few hundred cases are known to exist at any one time internationally to those in the fields of academia, biotech and the life sciences, government, health and science policy, citizen activists/thought leaders, policy analysts, scientists and clinicians and again, the family members of those with rare disorders who have been plunged into the world of nonprofit management and health policy activism and now have to speak the language of genetics and genomics simply out of love for a child with, say, a chromosomal or metabolic disorder.

I have been struck here by how slowly and clearly the many parents who lead such foundations pronounce the name of the condition their child has and how articulately they can explain it (e.g., “NBIA stands for Neurodegeneration with Brain Iron Accumulation (NBIA) disorders….”) which probably comes from long hours of lobbying at every level of government, addressing community groups, chatting with potential donors, working on educational materials and Web sites devoted to the illness and so on.

And these parents (and raising any child requires devotion, not to mention raising one with a chronic disease and/or disability) have had to master not only the terminology of that particular illness but the rapidly changing scientific landscape as the field of genomics has advanced. They also have to school themselves in the minutiae of running nonprofits, which covers everything from fundraising to grants management to tax law and privacy regulation. Oh, and throw in mastering the intricacies of the art of effective social media use, Web site operation, public relations, volunteer management, burnout prevention.

As someone who spends huge amounts of time visiting the sites of the members of the Genetic Alliance looking for grants, fellowships, science prizes, calls for papers for scientific conferences and announcements of such conferences to list on ScanGrants and ResearchRaven, it has been fascinating for me to actually meet the people who run these groups and to sit among them as we all listened to the amazingly diverse groups of experts from such federal agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Public Health Genomics, and such entities as the National Human Genome Research Institute.

One of the sessions featured a talk by Jean Jenkins, a nurse researcher, about G2C2, the Genetics/Genomics Competency Center for Education.

Jenkins made the point that genomic applications in healthcare are increasingly relevant to the day-to-day delivery of care to patients by all health care professionals and has helped create a centralized web resource on that topic for nursing and physician assistant educators. I thought of the many nursing students who passed through the medical library I used to work in and what a new world they will all face as genomics know-how becomes de rigueur in all healthcare settings. The Genetic Alliance excels at public and provider education on such fairly arcane but soon to become common enough concerns in our healthcare experiences, as professionals and as patients.

As I said above when I attend a conference, I think who might have benefitted from also attending it. Here is the agenda—look for yourself.

Offhand, I would think that nurse educators, nurse researchers, health educators, public health workers, health economists, physicians, lawyers in the field of health law, professors of public policy (they could learn a thing or two from the advocacy prowess of the Genetic Alliance) and technologists would all benefit from face time with so many federal and state government people who serve on the advisory boards and committees and bureaus that make policy.

My particular passions and hobby horses, for instance, are Open Science, Open Data, Open Access and Science 2.0. What struck me the most by attending the Genetic Alliance conference are the common interests that the Open Science and Genetic Alliance communities have (e.g., advancing medical and scientific research). What does the Genetic Alliance bring to the table in that regard? Well, sheer brainpower and ability when it comes to public policy in the fields of science and medical research with an impressive track record, such as an instrumental role in the passing of Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) of 2008.

And much of the Open Science agenda will require allies in policymaking circles, given that so much of it is predicated on the exchange of information, funding for higher education and cyberinfrastructure and scientific research. And I can’t think of a better ally when it comes to perseverance and expertise on matters scientific and legal/legislative in the medical research realm than the Genetic Alliance.

And, as I have found of leaders of the Open Science movement (like Jean-Claude Bradley and Bora Zivkovic), the leaders and members of the Genetic Alliance are just plain nice people. I talked to many people who, like me, had never attended the conference before and we were all struck by how pleasant the staff is. Likable, bright, enthusiastic, committed to the cause of helping all of their members from simple moral support in a dismal era for nonprofits to the creation of innovative, practical tools and an increasing array of Web-based repositories both of educational materials and biological materials.

Just as example of how niceness is a big factor in the success of the Genetic Alliance, one of the traditions of the conference is the appearance of Francis Collins, now head of the NIH and one of the giants of the fine art of science administration and a major figure in the field of genetics. I have read about him over the years and of what a decent, lovable caring person he is and he is certainly beloved by the genetics community, personified by the people I met at this conference.

Collins was very approachable—he simply appeared with his guitar and sang songs of the Bob Dylan/Pete Seeger variety and invited one and all to join in. And several of the songs were takeoffs on academia and genetics (not, one would think, promising material or hilarity) and very funny. Much laughter and merriment.

I am a rather conservative person and don’t usually go for “Kumbaya Moments,” but I got quite tearful at one point (actually, tears were streaming down my face) as Collins sang about good people and I knew the room was filled with researchers and family members of the ill or dead from genetic diseases and with students embarking on careers in medicine and genetic counseling and I thought of all those years of study and board meetings and letter writing they had cumulatively put in.

I thought most of my beloved boss in the medical library and her recent death from ALS and I finally worked up the courage to tell Dr. Collins how much Dorothy had meant to me, how she had taught me to use one of the NIH’s finest tools, PubMed and how grateful I am to him for his work in advancing scientific research on ALS and other diseases in his time in government. I got tearful and must have seemed a bit peculiar. But he made me feel quite at ease and just said softly something along the lines of, “We will do whatever we can to fight those diseases.” It shows the high regard the president and CEO of the Genetic Alliance Sharon Terry is held in that a man of the stature of Francis Collins and a man that busy came to hang out with her and people lucky enough to have attended this conference.

I have to pack up now to head home later today. I am happy to report that the session Science 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, and Open Science: The Revolution is Now I helped lead went well. I talked too long and interrupted the attendees. (Ooops!)  But I was impressed by the ideas generated for possible Open Science projects and was grateful for the interest shown in that important topic. Everyone in the room was supportive and patient. Never has one person been rescued by so many people so often. (I have an unfortunate habit of misplacing glasses, hearing aids, etc.)

I learned a lot here and leave with ever greater respect for disease advocacy groups.

I am incredibly impressed with the caliber of the speakers and attendees. It is really a privilege to get to meet and mingle with those in the genetics, rare disease and advocacy communities.

I came to give a talk on Web site design and had as a slide what I called, “The Perfect Grant Announcement” given that it had everything that those looking for funding in research like to see immediately. To wit, the amount of the award, the deadline for applications, the purpose of the grant, in this case, “The organization is currently soliciting grant applications for funding of research projects focused on the pathophysiology or treatment of Erdheim-Chester Disease.” I had rushed to enter the announcement on ScanGrants.

And it was such a delight during my talk to have the very person responsible for offering the grant pipe up, “Oh, that is ours” said Kathy Brewer ECD Global Alliance, President.

Please tweet and blog about that opportunity. It is not often that $50,000 is on offer (note the application deadline of August 11, 2010) for research on a fascinating medical mystery.

This is the kind of interaction that happens at the Genetic Alliance Annual Conference. Here we have dedicated people at a foundation devoting themselves to helping researchers prevent or cure disease and doing all they can to reach out to scientists and physician researchers.

And it is not only in the actual sessions that one meets people doing important work. In the hall I met Janet Braga who is the project manager for the upcoming national conference, Genetic Diseases of Children: Advancing Research & Care, which I immediately entered into ResearchRaven when I got back to my room as it is just the kind of gathering that we like to feature on ResearchRaven (and please feel me to send me details of any similar meetings you are holding for possible listing on it): an announcement of a medical meeting on an important topic that encompasses so many issues: child health, public health, genetics, screening tests, preventive medicine. I often spend many hours working in relative silence on ScanGrants and ResearchRaven and it has been a heartwarming experience to actually meet people like Kathy and Janet, both of whom are employing their talents to bring together researchers for the betterment of humanity and the advancement of medical researchers. Not a bad way to spend one’s life.

And I got to meet chat with two men with whom I will speak in a session later this morning (maybe I will be able to get back to sleep after posting this and so not be a total wreck by the time we present) called Science 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, and Open Science: The Revolution is Now.

I had met Robert Shelton, the founder and CEO of Private Access, before and have long been impressed by his prescience and vision in perfecting software products that manage the difficult feat of ensuring patient privacy while facilitating the research process. It is indeed almost uncanny that Private Access has in place a suite of tools that is so well suited to the Obama administration’s emphasis on ensuring patient privacy and security of health information.

I learned about that initiative by chatting with my fellow presenter in the Science 2.0 session, Brent Gendleman, President and CEO of 5AM Solutions, Inc. (and how appropriate that I am writing about him at just about that time of day!). He seems to me to possess many of the qualities I like in Robert. They are both entrepreneurs but not simply out to make a buck but to employ their technical and managerial skills to truly make the research process more efficient and thereby save time and money—admirable goals. And the blog of 5AM Solutions is that rarity—a corporate blog that is actually interesting, thoughtful and well written and indeed rather moving.

For example, in one post Gendleman discourses on matters that mesh with much of what is being stressed at the Genetic Alliance Conference:

* we are discovering more about how genes relate to disease

* we are able to produce volumes of data dramatically faster and cheaper than even wildly imagined 10 years ago

* we are not equipped to understand, interpret and apply knowledge from the data explosion as effectively as we would like.

I am very privileged to have gotten the chance to meet such a variety of people here at the conference. Kudos to Sharon Terry, President and CEO of the Genetic Alliance, for organizing this remarkable gathering. One aspect of it that I find particularly inspiring is the esprit de corps of the Genetic Alliance staff. Rarely does one come across such a uniformly friendly, capable, endlessly patient, talented group of people so solicitous of the needs of conference attendees. Talk about gracious hospitality galore. Terry sets the tone and if I had a son or daughter studying the health sciences I would say, “Go try to get an internship at the Genetic Alliance! You will be mentored and nurtured by some of the most effective health policy advocates and experts in the world. Go, for it!” Terry herself could not be a better role model of accomplishment and impact.

Finally, I was able to participate in Genetics Day on the Hill and visited congressional offices with a group of my fellow northwesterners to discuss genetic testing oversight, public access to federally-funded research results, and public engagement in clinical research. As an Oregonian, I was proud of the quality of the aides we met with in the offices of Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Representatives Kurt Schrader and David Wu. The staffers were polite, well versed in the issues, listened to what we had to say, took careful notes and were altogether personable and likable and I am grateful to the Genetic Alliance for making me feel that public servants are not scoundrels of the rankest sort but decent people dedicated to policy making in the public interest. And I certainly learned a lot from the others in my group who included Liz Horn, the director of the Genetic Alliance BioBank, Susan Trinidad, a bioethicist from the University of Washington, and Dean & Teryn Suhr of the MLD Foundation.

It is amazing how much medical research is funded by foundations created by the family members of those with serious conditions and I was very impressed by the dedication and knowledge of the Suhrs on the range of issues covered at this conference. They, like many others in the disease advocacy community, sang the praises of the Genetic Alliance and I can very see why, given what a range of expertise it offers to those interested in matters of rare disorders, public policy on matters of patient privacy, health technologies, bioethics, genetic matters and a host of related issues. It functions as a clearinghouse, think tank, training ground for bright young minds in the health sciences, and skillful crafter of strategies for advancing medical research in a reasoned, calm and persuasive fashion.  And runs a biobank and…

I loved someone with ALS who died recently. I am very grateful that there are people like Sharon Terry in the world who manage to be both personally charming and tireless in fighting the good fight for better ways to get things done in the world of medical research. I am so glad I came to this conference. And as I have yet to proofread this post, I don’t think I am going to get that last bit of sleep in before heading off for another day of it.

The article is E Is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evolutionary [E]Journal by Gerry McKiernan The Serials Librarian, 1541-1095, Volume 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 293 – 321.

McKiernan has very generously, helpfully self-archived the piece here.

There are several reasons I want to write about McKiernan’s piece.

First of all, the article is an excellent overview of what publishing an article in a scholarly journal has entailed over the years, how things stood in 2002 and how things were progressing back then.  I wish I had been assigned this article in library school and recommend it to library science instructors.

I was particularly struck by the wording, “…the journal is one large object made up of article objects, individual request objects, a server object, solution objects, page objects, and reference objects, and other objects that interact with each other, the network and the hardware environment to create the journal that is delivered to each reader…In this model, the reader is considered an object that dynamically participates in the creation of the journal.”

Pretty prescient of McKiernan and the authors he cites, End-User Customized Chemistry Journal Articles Steven M. Bachrach,* Anatoli Krassavine, and Darin C. Burleigh J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci., 1999, 39 (1), pp 81–8.

I had not heard of Steven Bachrach before and it really is fascinating how much of the work in leveraging the power of the Web for Science 2.0 is being done not by info professionals but by chemists such as Bachrach, Jean-Claude Bradley, and Antony Williams.

Librarians and information scientists are major beneficiaries of the work the chemists and other basic scientists are doing vis-à-vis transforming the very basics of how science is done and what forms scientific communication and scholarly publishing are taking.

Thank you, Gerry McKiernan, for instance, for introducing those of who live in the world of librarianship and the info sciences to the quite brilliant Dr. Bachrach who seems to have no trouble excelling in his field of chemistry while in his off hours helping to transform the very basis of the cornerstones of the edifice of scientific communication: the journal and the article. Kind of depressing, really, what people like Bachrach, Williams and Bradley accomplish in so many fields while the rest of us struggle along trying to do even one or two fairly useful things in our own, less impressive grooves!

The second reason I wanted to highlight McKiernan’s article is that it is an excellent example of the value of self-archiving as a way of sharing one’s scholarly production with greater audiences than may be subscribers of a particular journal. Thanks to McKiernan’s proactive actions of a) self-archiving his article so that it is easily accessible as a PDF to all comers and b) alerting various audiences to his article with a link on where to find it more of us can learn about important topics.

For instance, I noticed a message from McKiernan himself in one of the electronic discussion lists of The American Society for Information Science & Technology ASIS&T: a good lesson on the merits of unabashed marketing of one’s work. I wish more librarians would do the same—don’t be shy, group! More of us should request from scholarly publishers (and this goes for everyone—scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the sciences, etc.) the right to self-archive or deposit our work in institutional repositories.

And this brings me another reason I want to highlight McKiernan’s act of self-archiving. It is actually to the benefit of the journal and thus to the publisher of it.

For instance, I am not a serials librarian but I am now interested in the journal in which McKiernan’s article first appeared and have been perusing the web site of the journal, The Serials Librarian and almost certainly would not now be considering subscribing had I not been able to download and read McKiernan’s article and to think, “Hmm, I am not a serials librarian. But this is a pretty thought-provoking article. I wonder what else is in that journal…”

And I came across some quite interesting stuff in the abstracts, like this one about the article, “What Color is Your Paratext?” and was edified there to read this quite interesting passage:

Geoffrey Bilder from CrossRef discussed the problem of how to identify trustworthy scholarly information on the Internet. This problem is exacerbated by readers’ growing distrust of intermediaries such as publishers and librarians, by the fact that the Internet lacks the traditions that have developed in scholarly communication to ensure trust, and by the sheer amount of information now readily available. Paratext is understood as anything outside of a text that sets expectations about that text. In the past, paratext, for example a publisher logo, provided important clues as to the trustworthiness of information. In the context of the Internet, Bilder suggested creating a meta-brand to serve as paratext. CrossRef is developing a meta-brand called CrossMark that would certify for the reader that the online content to which it is attached has been vetted by processes of scholarly review and is therefore trustworthy.

That snippet made me think, “How sloppy of me to have gotten all the way through library school just a year ago and not really to have grasped what CrossRef is.”

Therefore, I checked out what it is exactly.

This is a rather long-winded (but you are all used to that with me, no?) way of saying that allowing for self-archiving is good for readers, authors who want to be read and the journals that allow for it. It also shows that journals can be quite effectively promoted by the generosity of the editors who allow people like McKiernan to self-archive. Good for Taylor & Francis, Routledge and Informa (so many imprints these days!) for allowing me to get a look via McKiernan’s article for free of what kinds of things appear in The Serials Librarian and thereby better gauge the value of a paid subscription to it. Clever of them! And, by the way, kudos to Iowa State University Library for sharing the esteemed McKiernan with the wider world of library and information science.

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.

This is all quite fascinating for those interested in how publishers are faring in a rapidly changing online world in which both the public and policymakers are scrutinizing the existing cozy, rigid realm of sci/tech and medical publishing and not liking what they see.

I have written about DeepDyve’s innovative “Research. Rent. Read.” model before and have since then chatted on the phone with DeepDyve’s CEO, William Park. I had been planning to write about DeepDyve’s interesting alliance with CiteULike but wanted to first attend ScienceOnline2010 because I knew that there was to be a session there called, “Online Reference Managers”
and that one of the firms to be discussed at it was to be CiteULike.

And here I am going to digress into matters of nomenclature. CiteULike itself uses the wording, “free service for managing and discovering scholarly references” and “scholarly bookmarking services,” whereas at ScienceOnline2010 we saw the wording, “Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information.”

Soooo, take your pick. I think I am going to stick with social bookmarking as that seems the most common term, and it is easier for me to type the word “social” than the word “scholarly.”

In any case, I am glad that I attended that session at ScienceOnline (and if I were a vendor or startup that had anything to do with software in the sciences I would send a huge contingent to next year’s conference, as there will be many opportunities there to get a feel for products that the online science community needs) because it gave me a better handle on social bookmarking in the sciences. Oh, rats—maybe I should have stuck with the term scholarly bookmarking. So many words for the same thing.

I am actually somewhat grateful for my sloth since then and for not having written about the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance (which is not a partnership per se, as far as I can tell) because there have been several developments at DeepDyve in the interval that I can now discuss in this one post, having finally roused myself to a state of modest activity.

Let us first examine what makes the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance interesting and what might enable the two firms to actually make some money from it.

Here are the pros at this stage as I see them.

First of all, Mr. Park has long argued that there is a substantial pool of researchers (and I would argue a vast unrecognized group of laypeople who have a driving interest in a scientific subject whether as a hobby or because they are activists on an environmental issue, say, or are afflicted by or love someone with a dire illness) who have need of scholarly articles but who have no access to resource-rich libraries and so have to either pay whopping sums (say $35 a pop for maybe seven pages of text), prevail on the good will of those who do have access to such resources (and those so beseeched may feel uneasy about complying with such supplications given how confusing and occasionally draconian copyright rules are on sharing scholarly articles) or do without the information.

DeepDyve’s pitch to publishers is that this is a huge market and that sci/tech publishers (many of which are professional societies that make money from their publishing operations and which have simply ignored non-members or disdained them as dilettantes or ignoramuses unworthy of attention) are better off trying to entice them by risking peeks at articles online for 99 cents in the hopes that the lurker will so like what he sees via his non-reproducible, non-downloadable peek that he will pony up for the actual PDF or otherwise downloadable version.

The trick for both CiteULike and DeepDyve is to persuade the publishers that they are better off trying the 99 cent peek gambit than to remain aloof from this group and continue their present ways of making money: squeezing libraries until the pips squeak (not a sustainable strategy given cost pressures in academia at even the richest of institutions, let alone cash-strapped ones), charging ever more for personal subscriptions, and assuming that the general public is willing to continue forking over $20-45 for articles when they are becoming aware of the Open Access movement. This awareness and concomitant disgruntlement are fueling the drive for public access to taxpayer-funded research. In the current anti-corporate, tar and feather the price gougers public mood DeepDyve could actually provide some cover and heretofore untapped revenue streams for the publishers willing to partner with DeepDyve (and DeepDyve is making major strides there—more on that below).

Let us stick with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance for the moment. Another plus for the publishers that they should take note of is its potential as a way of advertising the existence of its offerings to educated (who also tend to be affluent ones) readers.

For instance, if you do a search in CiteULike you often will come up with journals you had not heard of before. Now, if I could take a series of 99-cent peeks at various articles in a periodical without even getting up my from desk (as opposed to, say, emailing asking for a free sample copy which I may or may not be granted and which may take weeks to arrive in hard copy and which may be several years old and thus not good advertising of the value of the journal) I might be impressed enough to subscribe to the journal itself or simply go ahead and purchase the full text of several articles.

The risk for the publishers, of course, is that I will do nothing but peek, get the gist and never do much more than that. But at least they would have gotten maybe $5 out of me that day, which is better than nothing.

Another plus for the publishers of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is that as more and more libraries cut back on journal subscriptions even researchers that are affiliated with universities will find that they can’t get what they need from their own institutions and may start using the 99-cent peek and either download the full article (a win for the publisher) or try to get the full article via their library’s interlibrary loan service (which is still a win for the publisher in that some interest has been generated in the journal, which means some library somewhere will continue subscribing to it).

A minus for the publisher of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is the rather inert state of scholarly bookmarking services (and spam problems at Connotea, for instance), so whether they would truly get much business from hooking up with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is another question. (For instance, I just tried out CiteULike again for really the first major go at it since I set up my account way back in 2005—but then I am not a heavy duty scholar).

Likewise, for CiteULike the value of the relationship with DeepDyve can be realized only if DeepDyve can demonstrate that it has many big-name publishers on board.

For example, I tried a search just now in CiteULike on my usual search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Because DeepDyve has no relationships with publishers that feature the huge number of journals in the neurological sciences that, say Springer (which, as the sponsor of CiteULike, you would think would come on board with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance) or Elsevier do, I saw not a single icon for the 99-cent peek.

But the fact that I could not see the icon for my search is really an argument for the value of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance to publishers. I mean here I was, doing a search. My debit card is in the room. I could easily have ordered several articles if I had had immediate access to a peek and possibly sizable sums of money could have been extracted from me just now.

Think about that scenario, publishers. Do you really want me to have to try to find your stuff in Google or hope that I know enough to use PubMed and get to your toll access sites from there and then hope that I will simply hand over $35 or so without a peek or peep?

And DeepDyve is starting to forge a pretty impressive roster of blue ribbon publishers among its offerings and is approaching critical mass in terms of raising the comfort level among prestige publishers with its “Research. Rent. Read.” model. It now has relationships with major scholarly publishers such as the MIT Press, and the University of California Press, and with professional societies like the American Institute of Physics, the Radiological Society of North America, and the Association for Computing Machinery. Not bad.

I am quite puzzled, actually, as to why this quite interesting company is not getting the attention it merits in the library and scholarly publishing blogosphere. Perhaps librarians aren’t writing about it because they can usually, via professional networks and personal relationships, get their patrons what they need. Open Access people are not writing about it because they are philosophically opposed to cash changing hands when it comes to research information.

But let’s talk ugly truths here. We are not in a world where everyone has access to library resources galore. And not everything is Open Access yet. There are large numbers of people who need scholarly information and should have an affordable option for getting it and publishers should be aware that there are ways to make some money is some instances rather than none in many and that 99-cent peeks can lead to years of individual subscriptions.

William Park is an endlessly creative thinker. DeepDyve started off a nice little search engine. That in itself was interesting and worthwhile. He is now creating new models for the entire sci/tech publishing industry and making what had been a rather tired Web tool (social bookmarking) interesting again. Gotta hand it to the guy–there are second acts in American life.

And this is all in addition to your position with the healthcare arm of Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG).

One of the reasons that I am so pleased that you agreed to talk with me on the phone several months ago, Dr. Sands, is that like many people in healthcare I spend a lot of time reading grant announcements and it has been really fascinating to note how so many of the tenets and principles of Participatory Medicine you have been working so tirelessly and so eloquently to put onto the public policy agenda and onto the radar screens of everyone in healthcare are indeed making such an impact that they color the very wording used by federal grant-making agencies in their announcements of funding opportunities. Clearly, your work in changing the nature of how medical care is delivered in the US and internationally has made it clear that Participatory Medicine is not something out on the futuristic periphery but is affecting who will get funded and what technologies will be developed. This is very exciting and important.

I thought of you and your work, for instance, as I read through several federal healthcare-related grant announcements the other day and especially as I read through this one,
Exploratory and Developmental Grant to Improve Health Care Quality through Health Information Technology.

This wording seemed straight out of your playbook, for instance,

“The field of consumer health informatics focuses on providing consumers, patients and their caregivers, health information directly through computers and other telecommunication systems (Eysenbach, 2000). Meeting patients’ and caregivers’ increased need for health information may improve communication between health care providers, patients, and their caregivers. This may enhance patients’ abilities to self-manage chronic conditions and enhance their ability to follow treatment, medication, and monitoring regimens. Through improved control of disease there may be increased functionality and quality of life and fewer exacerbations of chronic conditions that necessitate emergency room visits and hospitalizations.

The body of literature regarding successful implementation of health IT in non-traditional ambulatory settings, such as in homes, residential settings, and various types of community centers, is underdeveloped. Successful health IT implementation in these ambulatory settings may provide much-needed tools to improve health care for various vulnerable populations including the elderly…”

Now, there are several aspects of that passage that I would like to ask you about. For example, it references Gunther Eysenbach who is generally regarded as the driving force behind Medicine 2.0.

Could you please tell us a bit about how you see Medicine 2.0 and how it differs from Health 2.0?

I view them as interchangeable, but if one were to split hairs, Medicine 2.0 is more focused the providers delivering care and Health 2.0 does not necessarily depend on providers at all.

And are you at all surprised by the fact that the policymakers are starting to require evidence from potential grantees that the latter are meeting the increased demands by e-Patients for clinical and not just-consumer level health data? For example, at the Medicine 2.0 conference in September 2009 the keynote was delivered by e-Patient Dave. His talk was memorably entitled, “Gimme My Damn Data!”

I believe that patient engagement (participatory medicine, call it what you will) is the right thing to do, but we need more evidence to support this contention, otherwise businesses will not invest and in it and health plans and governments will not pay for it.

Do you think health networks and community hospitals are starting to spot wording colored by exposure of grant makers to the tenets of Participatory Medicine? This is a crucial matter for healthcare institutions large and small who are hoping to garner grant funding to help pay for the gargantuan expenses of healthcare IT projects, correct?

Realistically, most health systems are focused on current reality. That reality is payment for quantity care, less for quality care, and no consideration for the continuum of care. While this may change, if we have significant health payment reform, it’s hard for health systems to change their way of doing business and ignore their revenue sources today. That’s not to say all systems think this way–some are retooling their systems to manage quality across the continuum of care–but most are still focused on high revenue procedures in the current environment.

However, health systems and practices are also focused on obtaining federal incentive funds (from the HITECH Act), which provides cash rewards for demonstrating “meaningful use” of certified electronic health records. In these proposed “meaningful use” criteria there is an expectation of giving patients electronic access to their medical records and a few other patient centric rules, but the criteria have not yet been finalized.

Are you starting to see an increased level of awareness by healthcare administrators and executives that they need to start showing responsiveness to this surge of interest by patients in optimal access to their personal health data?

To a certain extent, but it has to make business sense before they begin investing. Many hospitals are struggling to maintain their businesses, so they view this as a “nice to have,” rather than a “have to have.” Exceptions are hospitals that perform elective procedures not covered by insurance. That said, I believe that focusing on customer services makes good business sense, as some health systems find that if they can provide a superior customer experience it serves to attract business. Technology can be helpful here, by the way, as we’ve learned in financial services and some retail settings.

Do you think that registered health information administrators and others in the health information management field are even aware of the e-Patient movement?

No, I think we are early in the game. How many hospitals have chief experience officers today?

Are you starting to see more attendance by all of those groups at gatherings that feature you and e-Patient Dave as speakers?

Yes, it is picking up.

Indeed, you serve as one of the few people who serve as connectors between Participatory Medicine advocates and those such as many in healthcare IT and in hospital medical record departments who have been much more prone to hunker down and think, “HIPAA, HIPAA, HIPAA” and “hackers lurk in every corner.” Could you please give us examples of how Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group is assisting hospitals and healthcare networks balance the need for secure systems versus the growing desire by patients to access to their own data (and could you address the matter of whose data it actually is in various instances?)

There are many aspects to security and privacy. Some are related to technology–which involves both hardware (network, data center) and software (applications)—and others are related to people issues—policies and procedures. Both are needed to provide a robust environment that protects patient’s data and privacy.

On the hardware side, Cisco creates technology that protects networks and data centers. The IBSG pioneered the Medical Grade Network architecture, that creates networks that are secure, resilient, and flexible. Next, we provide data center solutions with a focus on security. IBSG then helps customers understand the patient experience and the future of the continuum of care. Clearly information technology, home monitoring, transparency, and patient engagement are a cornerstone of this, and the IBSG is working in all of these areas.

Do you think that the world of clinical research is going to be affected in similar fashion such as by increased responsiveness by the NIH (as evidenced by such bodies as the Director’s Council of Public Representatives) to demands by citizen activists for more public input on the allocation of tax money for the funding for clinical and public research? Are we seeing a real revolution in demands for greater transparency at all level of healthcare from what research is funded (such as pressures from such groups as the Alliance for Taxpayer Access to people like e-Patient Dave who want their damn data?

I’m all in favor of transparency and public input. Private foundation and corporate funding is not subject to much influence from the public, but Federal research dollars are sometimes earmarked for particular types of research under pressure from Congress, which is in turn influenced by constituents and lobbying groups. It’s not a perfect system, for sure.

Finally, we need greater access to clinical trial results. We have gone a long way towards that but still have far to go.

On a related note, are you excited by Harvard’s pioneering move to mandate Open Access to the work of its researchers?

Have you seen any evidence that this policy is affecting the research and publication practices of your colleagues of Harvard Medical School?

I have not seen its impact yet.

When you and I spoke on the phone, you said so much that was truly fascinating that as I look at my notes now I find them a bit of a jumble as I struggled to keep up with what you were saying. I asked you, for instance, what you see as several key developments to watch for vis-à-vis healthcare delivery and technologies. You mentioned several in particular:

• Care at a Distance
• Immersive Technologies
• Aging in Place
• Participatory Medicine

We have already discussed Participatory Medicine a bit. I would like now to ask you about Care at a Distance. As you know, I have talked a bit to Roy Schoenberg, MD, MPH the president and CEO of American Well Systems
and have written about American Well. I was quite interested in the fact that he was your student at Harvard (what was the class, specifically?)

Roy was an informatics fellow in my department, and I hired him. The department is currently called the Division of Clinical Informatics at BIDMC (formerly known as the Center for Clinical Computing). Fellows, usually after their medical or nursing training, spend 2-4 years in which they learn clinical informatics.

You mentioned on the phone that you see the Online Care services that American Well offers to healthcare plans as part of a continuum of care that could be complemented by some of Cisco’s products and services and mentioned Cisco’s HealthPresence in particular. Could you please give us examples of how such immersive technologies as HealthPresence would work in a world in which the first stop for a homebound chronically ill and/or elderly person (especially in a rural area or, say, in a crime-blighted urban one) might be an Online Care video conference via the American Well interface? Might a provider following such a conference arrange for the patient to visit a site at which HealthPresence is available? Might such sites be, say, senior centers or even onsite in the very assisted living facility the elderly person might be living in?

The idea is that a patient who may not be ill enough to be seen emergently or can’t be seen in a physician’s office, might start by contacting a physician online through AW. If the person was too ill to be managed through online chat or webcam interview, they could be referred to the nearest Cisco HealthPresence unit, which might be much closer than a medical office or hospital. The escalation would therefore go through CHP, rather than directly to the doctor’s office.

Who else might be interested in HealthPresence? Public health departments that serve rural clients or migrant workers? Prisons? Physician clinics that might utilize them at satellite offices? Hospitals and health networks that would see them as valuable extenders of their existing home healthcare networks?

There are a host of use cases for CHP, including:

• Clinical scenarios
o Patient-physician consultation
– Primary care
– Specialty care
o Physician-physician consultation (with patient)
o Urgent care
o Ongoing care
o Disease management
o Follow-up
• Locations
o Hospitals that lack specialist care
o Underserved rural or urban areas
o Retail settings
o Employee health clinics
o Correctional facilities
o Schools
o Battlefields
o Long-term care facilities
o Assisted living environments
o Others…
• “Owners”
o Hospitals/health systems/long-term care provider
o Community health centers
o Physician groups
o Health plans
o Government agencies
o Non-governmental agencies
o Retail chains
o Others…

I asked you on the phone if some healthcare administrators of brick and mortar institutions regard such innovative technologies and the whole concept of Care Anywhere as an existential threat to hospitals as we know them now (i.e. as buildings that we as patients and providers must travel to) and you made the interesting point that quite to the contrary—that many executives see Care Anywhere as both a public service and a way to extend revenue-generating existing services to an ever broader geographic area as well as facilitating monitoring of patients that ensures that they will not experience setbacks that send them right back to the hospital (and such rehospitalizations are often not covered by Medicare, thus imposing a financial hardship on patient and hospital alike).

Could you tell us a bit more about HealthPresence?

This is best discussed over the phone, but we have plenty of material, including descriptions and video here.

Would it be somewhat like a clinic in a box?

No, it replicates a medical, office at a distance using the network as a platform to deliver a high fidelity interaction.

Can modules be added to it as needs for services are determined over time?

Different clinical scenarios are manageable through different staff and different types of medical instrumentation. For example, a psychiatrist may need nothing (or only vital signs), while a cardiologist may require a stethoscope, an electrocardiogram, and an echocardiogram.

Are there models for specific health conditions (e.g., for diabetes)?

We are developing these models with our customers based on our experience.

Is it being used in the US at this point?

Yes. It is being used to provide healthcare to employees at Cisco campuses in San Jose and Research Triangle Park to employees at Cerner in Kansas City, MO, and it’s also being used by United Healthcare , and some of our health system customers are starting to deploy this, as well.

Is Cisco working with healthcare institutions on research that would address the wording that we saw in the grant mentioned above, “The body of literature regarding successful implementation of health IT in non-traditional ambulatory settings, such as in homes, residential settings, and various types of community centers, is underdeveloped…?” Indeed, you mentioned on the phone that the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group specializes in working with clients to test and implement such novel technologies. Could you discuss some of those projects and the IBSG’s role as thought leaders in healthcare and healthcare technology? Who else on the healthcare technology landscape is providing such cutting-edge consulting services?

As we work with customers on deployments we evaluate the impact of the projects and lessons learned. When possible, we work with partners to publish this, such as we did with our Aberdeen, Scotland pilot with the Scottish Centre for TeleHealth.

Could you please discuss the idea of Aging in Place?

Ageing Well in a Connected World is an area of thought leadership and demonstration projects that focuses on helping ageing citizens remain healthy, socially connected, independent, and working as long as they are able, facilitated by connected technologies. It is being executed a cross-industry, global IBSG project, primarily our public sector and healthcare teams.

When I saw you serve on a panel of judges of new technologies showcased at Health 2.0 in October of 2009 you and your fellow judges would often say something to the effect of, “Love the product. Pretty cool—but who is going to pay for it?” Do you think that we are getting to the point when such issues will be decided on the basis of pretty sophisticated research studies that will persuade policy makers and businesspeople that hospitals will pay for this, patient themselves out of pocket for that, health plans for thus and so and the federal government for such and such because some technologies are so obviously in the interest of each party in various circumstances. Could you provide examples of three such technologies vis-à-vis Aging in Place and tell us who you think will end up footing the bill and why they would decide to do so? Duress or just hardheaded number crunching? Do you think we are, under the pro-healthcare IT Obama administration, at a tipping point when it comes to Aging in Place technologies vis-à-vis cost effectiveness, reliability and true contribution to quality of life that soon such products and services will actually make it into the households of the elderly? What is one such product that has a wow factor for you?

In order for any technology to be adopted by the mainstream user, which is generally necessary for the survival of any company that provide a product or service (the exception being a government-subsidized entity), people must be willing to pay for it. This will come about when buyers (consumers, other companies, governments) see the value in this product or service. This may be an intangible value or utility (like an appliance or a consumer electronics product), but in this case it’s usually net economic value. This can only be assessed by implementing the technology and studying its impact.

This is even more important today. It is true that we face a graying population that places a high burden on western societies, but it is also true that we are more resource constrained than ever before. So we must prove the value of these potentially transformational projects, otherwise they will not be sustainable.

I asked you on the phone whom you consider important figures in the area of Participatory Medicine and you mentioned your colleagues at the Society for Participatory Medicine, Ted Eytan, MD,
and Kevin Leonard.

I hope I mentioned more than that. Alan Greene, e-Patient Dave, Susannah Fox, Charlie Smith, and many others, as well.

What conferences do you suggest those interested in Participatory Medicine attend and what professions are not attending those meeting that should? Hospital CEOs? The heads of hospital marketing departments (and do you see an open mind towards the use of Web 2.0 and social media and their use in the realm of Participatory Medicine as offering a competitive advantage to healthcare institutions that make that leap and tell us what institutions do you regard as exemplars in that respect)?

There are not that many conferences that focus squarely on PM yet, but conferences like the Connected Health Symposium, Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0, and even mHealth have strong PM components. More exciting to me are the mainstream healthcare conferences that are starting to have major presentations or tracks in topics related to participatory medicine.

I think we are seeing marketing people attend these already, but we need more CEOs and other business leaders. Those that come today already “get it” and are thinking about what they can do to engage their customers (patients) better by leveraging technology. We may not get more until we a) start demonstrating value, and b) health system reimbursement starts being linked to patient experience.

Where do you plan to speak in the next year?

I don’t know all of the presentations I’ll be doing yet. I do know that I’ll be running a Meet the Professor session on 21st century communication and social media at the Internal Medicine 2010 in Toronto in April, I’m supposed to do a keynote presentation on participatory medicine at Kevin Leonard’s One Patient One Record which I think will be in Ottawa in April, and I’ll be presenting at a New England HIMSS meeting in the Boston area. I don’t have my fall schedule set yet. I’m always interested in opportunities to wave the banner.

I notice that you tweet but do not seem to blog. Just too busy for the latter? Whom do you consider must reads in Twitterdom, the blogosphere, and the medical press?

I haven’t found the time for blogging, but I do write occasionally (one I wrote is on why I believe in participatory medicine here) and I comment on other blogs, as well. I do like Twitter.

e-patients.net
Geek Doctor
Ted Eytan.com
The Health Care Blog
Musings of a Distractible Mind
e-Patient Dave
HIS Talk
Running a Hospital
And others…

Finally, who are your personal heroes in medicine, technology, academia and in any other realm?

I don’t have a good answer for you because I don’t really think of people that way.

Thank you for your time, Dr. Sands.

You’re welcome.

But I would like to introduce you to the wider health technology and Open Science communities given your ability to recognize important technologies, tools and trends in the area of scientific and scholarly communication and your skill in explaining their use and recognizing their potential for many tasks. You are an educator and explicator supreme.

I envision as readers of this interview not only medical librarians and sci/tech librarians but anyone in the healthcare industry who needs information from time to time—and that is basically everyone in healthcare. Therefore, readers of this interview might include physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, healthcare administrators, healthcare informaticians, those in the fields of biomedical/clinical research, health information management and so on.

Moreover, I think that much of what you have to say will be of interest to the increasing numbers of empowered patients, known as e-Patients, most notably exemplified by people like e-Patient Dave and by readers of the site e-patients.net, which is run by the Society for Participatory Medicine.

E-Patients are a new breed of patients. They are sophisticated, determined seekers of healthcare information and medical librarians are going to encounter more and more of them and you are just the man to help those two groups get to know each other.

Finally, I would like to introduce you to those interested in the area of Open Science and scholarly communication in general. People like Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Antony Williams, John Wilbanks, and Bora Zivkovic are changing the very nature of how science is done and how research results are disseminated and I would like to get your views on how what they doing is going to affect us in the field of healthcare farther down the pipeline. Could you introduce yourself as if you were addressing this wide audience?

Hi, my name is Dean Giustini; I am a Canadian academic health sciences librarian and blogger living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. I am a biomedical librarian at University of British Columbia’s main teaching hospital in a new building called the Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre. My main responsibilities are to provide library, research and instructional support to UBC faculty and students at Vancouver General Hospital; I am also responsible for managing the onsite staff and collections of monographs and journals that support the academic and clinical activities onsite. Academically, I teach two courses at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies; 1) a new course on social media and 2) a traditional course on health librarianship.

My main extracurricular interests are related to web technologies in medicine. I enjoy providing information services to hospital personnel and teaching information literacy skills to medical students, but I enjoy collaborating with physicians using social media and Web 2.0 applications. I am a traditionalist librarian in my views but try to find the potential in digital interaction and web technologies in my work as well.

I first became aware of you around 2004-2005 when I was new to the field of medical librarianship and learning about how the Web was affecting how medical people acquire information. You were one of the first to address this topic in a very public and influential way with your 2006 article in the British Medical Journal, “How Web 2.0 is Changing Medicine.” Could you please tell us a little about what led to the publication of that piece, your reaction to the reactions to it and what has surprised or disappointed you vis-à-vis developments in the years since it was published?

That’s an interesting question. First of all, I was quite amazed by the interest that the BMJ web 2.0 editorial got – and how how often it is cited. It is an opinion piece not research. I had no idea it would be important when I wrote it. It was easy to write because I believed that social media would be important for all of us. And I could see how digital interaction using social media would be important to collaborative science. In retrospect, I can see why web 2.0 was controversial; even now biomedical librarians are debating the importance of web 2.0. The field of medicine and science has moved on from the squabbles around what ‘web 2.0’ means and whether it exists but perhaps the phrase ‘social media’ is more appropriate than the 2.0 suffix in discussing the technologies of the era.

In any case, I keep waiting for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to create a MeSH for web 2.0. Since the BMJ editorial, Eysenbach has defined medicine 2.0 and the 2.0 suffix is used for everything including for all kinds of marketing purposes. The most important aspect of web 2.0 is that the tools help us to build networks and take advantage of “Metcalfe’s Law” – the network effect – for collaboration. Although physicians are building silos around their networks in private spaces patients are very openly sharing information about themselves. I doubt there is much digital interaction between the two groups yet; I only know what physicians and patients tell me that they are starting to enjoy using the tools. I am not sure that the changes we are seeing in how patients and doctors communicate online comes close to what we see when patients interact with each other. It’ll never be equivalent because doctors operate within very different parameters of practice.

In that article you said, “For me, the promise of open access in Web 2.0—freed of publishing barriers and multinational interests—is especially compelling.” Where are we now in that respect?

When I wrote that line about the synergy between web 2.0 and open access I was referring to the publishing potential of social media and OA journals. Much of this potential remains unrealized. I have been disappointed by the poor performance of wikis versus the surprising growth of open access. Since the editorial, I got involved in Open Medicine – one of Canada’s open access journals. We are making progress and NLM accepted us recently for Medline (PubMedCentral) indexing. It’s been a long, arduous path, but we did it in two years.

You said in that piece, “The rise of wikis as a publishing medium—especially Wikipedia—holds some unexamined pearls for the advancement of medicine. The notion of a medical wikipedia—freely accessible and continually updated by doctors—is worthy of further exploration.” What do you think, then, of the Medpedia Project, other players such as Google’s Knol, and the fact that Wikipedia is experiencing an exodus of editors.

I am happy with the development of HLWIKI Canada (formerly the UBC Health Library wiki). But as a team of writers and health librarians, we are only beginning to use the wiki as a collaborative space and platform. One of the problems is that I write most entries. I continue to believe that medical/physician and librarian-moderated wikis can play a role in biomedical publishing but some wikis have simply not caught on – and no where near what we have seen with Wikipedia. I’m not sure what the reasons are, but PageRank in Google has helped Wikipedia move up to the top of search results. These factors have an impact on whether your wiki will be seen and used.

Occasionally, I check out what is happening at Google’s Knol. I read an article recently and compared it with Medpedia. Despite the support Medpedia has, I am not sure how it is doing. When I go to the site I am left with a feeling of ‘so what’ – can’t we do better? AskDrWiki and Ganfyd are good wikis but again they are not very well-known. I worry that the ‘free’ remix culture espoused by Chris Anderson and Lawrence Lessig has hit a wall of some kind and that people are tired of contributing with no recognition. Perhaps this is Wikipedia’s problem too. At some point, folks bail out and try something else.

Do you see wikis as less useful for medicine than was first thought or are there are wikis run by those in certain medical specialties that are thriving and that it is only the general interest ones that seem to be hitting a wall? How is the Open Medicine wiki project going, for instance, which you wrote about in the post “Can Wikis be Used as a Publishing Platform in Medicine?”

The Open Medicine wiki has suffered from the same fate as the wikis we’ve mentioned above. The main issue is that maintaining a wiki is a lot of work and you need an army of writers, editors and volunteers. The wiki is a labour of love –I do a lot of promotion of it whenever I can. I cannot contribute to the Open Medicine wiki because I am not a physician. I think that the OM wiki is worth a try, but I wonder about its staying power. I often have trouble getting docs to use PubMed properly, so how can I convince them to contribute to building a wiki? It’s uncertain.

What do you see as the future of a user-generated content in medicine in general, whether by patients in such online communities as PatientsLikeMe or by medical people for each other in gated communities such as Sermo or by the quite interesting attempt to enlist both practitioners and patients in the form of audiences and contributors in the Journal of Participatory Medicine.

User-generated content where social tools are used in medicine will continue to evolve in ‘specialized niche areas.’ I worry about these niches because they engender ‘bias.’ Typically, we friend people we agree with and ‘block’ those we don’t agree with; this prevents disagreement. You mention the consumer health social space PatientsLikeMe and the physician social networking site Sermo – generally viewed as two successful examples of social media. The last report I heard, AMA had severed its relationship with Sermo because it did not have enough say about the direction of Sermo. When it started, Sermo was an ‘adverse reporting’ system and it morphed into a social networking site. The lesson is that medicine is still monolithic and apt to change in time. The veil of secrecy cannot be removed overnight; patriarchy will change over time. The ‘wedge’ or tipping point for social media will probably be in the area of online consultations and finding ways to compensate doctors for their time.

Getting back to the matter of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Participatory Medicine, could you comment on one of the most interesting articles in it, “In Search of an Optimal Peer Review System?”

What, for instance, is your reaction to that article given that it is by Richard Smith, someone closely associated with the British Medical Journal, the very periodical that published your own article on the Web and medicine? What do you think of Smith’s comments, for instance, “I think that it would make much more sense simply to publish the paper — on a university website or in an electronic journal with a low threshold — with my comments and those of the other reviewer and let the world decide what it thinks. That is anyway what happens in that many peer-reviewed papers disappear without trace after publication, some are torn to pieces, and a few flourish and are absorbed into the body of science.” And, “Web 2.0, the social web, may hold the key to the future of peer review. Peer review will become the job of the many rather than the few, and we know that the many can solve problems better than the few…”

I enjoy Richard Smith’s ideas and thinking about web 2.0. He is on the Editorial Board of Open Medicine. His views are very progressive. He is trying to make his profession more transparent and accountable to patients. When a high profile person discusses peer review and publishing papers on accessible websites for all to see and critique –I listen. There is a downside to open peer review – poor bibliographic control. What Smith may or may not know is that researchers publishing openly on the web would create chaos – how would we find anything? How would studies be comprehensively indexed? This is a big problem of the information age. When you take advantage of anytime, anywhere publishing — you also fragment the medical bibliography and make it more difficult to organize.

And on a related topic, do you see the recent moves by Harvard and MIT to mandate Open Access policies as momentous vis-à-vis mounting a genuine challenge to the power of the big publishing houses and creating a workable model of Open Access publishing that other universities could follow, thereby creating a world in which scholarly publishing and clinical research could indeed be freed of the fetters of the tyranny of antiquated publishing practices that hinder the advancement of science and impede efforts to help patients farther down the line? Or are the publishers simply too powerful and the forces of tradition vis-à-vis peer review, and tenure and promotion practices simply too entrenched for radical change? Are the Harvard and MIT policies the tipping point for an Open Access world or noble but ultimately fruitless endeavors? Are they harbingers of real change that will affect the day-day-day lives of clinical researchers and, therefore, farther down the line, medical providers and medical librarians?

In an ideal world “Why can’t we all get along”? Universities, multinational publishers and institutional repositories such as PubMedCentral should be working together and building partnerships. I am surprised a public-private hybrid model has not emerged. Academic librarians should take the lead and offer to host journals using open journal systems (OJS). For unprofitable journals, or those with small readerships, publishers should think about good corporate citizenship and help struggling society and university publishers to publish journals.

Now, let’s talk techno tools. The name of your blog, for instance, is The Search Principle blog and on Twitter you categorize yourself as a “bio-medical librarian, renegade, techno-enthusiast.” Let’s parse that a bit. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? What, for example, is a bio-medical librarian versus a plain old medical librarian? A renegade in what respect?

I am all three: a health librarian, a medical librarian and a biomedical librarian. I answer to all. I wrote that on Twitter and on my blog because I had to come up with something. I’m not too much of a renegade, but I admit I won’t tolerate inequities and I stand up for others who cannot stand up for themselves. Perhaps this is what I am trying to do in my profession: stand up for our field, for excellence and high standards.

And as to being a techno-enthusiast, what are your top five favorite Web or search tools and what should we look for techno-wise in the coming year for medical librarians and vis-à-vis Web users in healthcare generally?

Keep in mind that I have to answer your questions from my perspective as a Canadian. Finding as much Canadian content as I can – medical evidence, statistics and local consumer health information — is central in my work. The websites or search tools that I cannot do without are: 1) The BC Health Guide 2) Public Health Agency of Canada 3) Health Canada 4) The Cochrane Library and 5) Medline OR PubMed. I also think that WorldCat is important as are Bing and Google Scholar (and all three have Canadian content).

Do you regard Wolfram|Alpha as a flash in the pan or as something truly promising? What do you think of Rupert Murdoch’s pushback vis-à-vis Google? Dumb move on his part? Is Google the default and any moves to try to shift Web users to Bing doomed from the get-go?

Wolfram Alpha has a lot of promise, but it may in fact be a ‘flash in the pan.’ For laypeople, and non-scientists, it’s not easy to use. We want it to behave like our print tools like the Merck Index and the CRC Handbook to behave – with intelligence and intuition. The only problem is that searchers do not know how to extract the information from it or how to form answerable questions.

As to Murdoch and his rejection or challenge to Google, I think it’s fine. Google needs competition. The more players we have in search the better. I don’t think Bing is doomed and don’t think it will be easy to dethrone Google. Ten or eleven years ago, no one thought Yahoo could be unseated as the most important search tool. The whole area of web searching continues to get attention for the money – but it too will stop flowing if the tools do not produce usable results or become cumbersome to use.

Getting back to Twitter, what are your favorite tools in it, how has its advent changed your work practices, whom has it connected you with that you had not known of before and how do you see it being used effectively by librarians, clinical researchers and front-line clinicians? Can you give us specific real-world instances of its use in clinical settings?

We need a whole conference to discuss Twitter properly. I will say that it has evolved since it was first developed – because we, the users, have seen its potential applications. Twitter suits me (and my needs) on a number of different levels: first, I’m a snoop so Twitter satisfies my need to listen to other people and to access information and gossip in real-time. Second, I enjoy hearing about other people’s working lives, projects and thoughts on world events. Finally, I enjoy myself more when I have information sent to me. Danah Boyd speaks eloquently on her blog about how she was intimidated by backchannels while she spoke at a conference. But Twitter is useful to all kinds of clinical people; I hear some psychologists use it to remind patients to take their medication. For anyone who needs to send tweets in the future, you can use a range of clients to send your ‘network of contacts’ messages at selected intervals.

Whom do you regard as the best tweeters in medicine and librarianship? Any additions to your list here?

I will definitely be adding to this list in 2010. Stay tuned.

Do you see Twitter as eclipsing blogs per se or do you find that Twitter drives traffic to blogs? Do you foresee the RSS button on blogs and Web sites being replaced by Twitter buttons? Or is RSS the perfect tool for leveraging the power of Twitter? Who are your favorite bloggers?

All of the tools you mention such as blogs and RSS feeds are affected by other social media. But I don’t see any tool that you have mentioned being eclipsed or replaced. Blogs are central to our culture now. Twitter has changed some of our behaviours and writing less than 15 words or 140 characters; it too is part of our culture. I like Twitter because there is power in concision and regular posts to your network. All of this is a part of defining your influence in the spaces of web 2.0. But none of that will stop me from blogging which is integral in my work.

You provide here a very useful overview of social media tools and I was interested in this comment, “RSS feeds can potentially replace traditional email lists, reducing email overload.” Have you indeed noticed that some email lists are disappearing or are people simply using tools such as Feed My Inbox
to use RSS a way to create email alerts? Are RSS readers really gaining traction among the general public or are they passé as far as the masses are concerned and are they falling out of favor even with the info-minded cognoscenti?

The level of general interest in RSS feeds and aggregating tools like Bloglines and iGoogle has been disappointing. There are physicians and other health professionals who do not know what “RSS” means or why it might be useful. The dominant form of communication is still e-mail. I maintain accounts on a number of aggregators and have discovered new aggregators such as Netvibes and Ning. The latter is a tool that allows you to create your own network – and it is very easy to use. But its adoption in medicine is minimal.

Thank you for your time, Dean.

I work in the healthcare industry and one of my tasks is keeping up on developments in how clinical research is funded and conducted and its results disseminated. I have worked in a medical library, for instance, and medical librarians know about the Open Access movement. But they may not know about all of the vitality and software tool generation that is happening in the world of Open Science, activity which leads to the publication of what becomes the final product as far as medical librarians and their patrons (physicians, nurses, pharmacists) are concerned—a paragraph or two in a piece of medical literature.

I envision as the readers of this interview a wide range of people including medical librarians, medical students, undergraduates and graduate students in the sciences and engineering, technologists, healthcare industry analysts and anyone interested in what appears to be a revolution in scientific communication, a revolution that we can all welcome given that it promises to streamline many aspects of the scientific process and to facilitate communication between scientists to the ultimate benefit of everyone who will ever become ill or love someone who is. As you can see, you are a very important person in my book!

Here is how I came to hear of you. I began to write about search engines and then about Science 2.0 matters in 2008. I came to visit the Life Scientists room of FriendFeed.

Being new to the subject, I noted that I kept seeing certain names bandied about as the go-to experts on the subject of Open Science and noticed that certain people were cogent thinkers and superb writers and people who appeared to be made of nothing but stamina and brilliance, so ubiquitous was their presence and so obvious their influence among the scientists in that community. I kept seeing certain names (e.g., Jean-Claude Bradley, Michael Nielsen, Bora Zivkovic, Bill Hooker). And I kept seeing references to a certain Cameron, who seemed to be universally regarded as the man who would assess astutely to the benefit of all some significant development in the world of online science. I wondered who this Cameron was. I know much more now, having discovered your blog, Science in the Open,
your postings in FriendFeed and having viewed many of your slideshows.

Could you please tell us a bit of your background? What kind of scientist are you, for instance?

I started off in what was at the time fairly conventional metabolic biochemistry doing an undergraduate project looking at what food molecules platelets selected from plasma when given the choice. Then I moved more towards biophysics and biotechnology during my PhD, looking at ways to manipulate DNA to make what were then large libraries of variants of the gene specific protein, trying to figure out how to make protein copies of all of those genes and then select the one or two out the billions that did what we want. The theme since then has really been about developing new ways of applying physical techniques from physics and chemistry to looking at protein structure and function.

My current job at the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK is an interesting mix of developing new techniques, using these to tackle specific structural problems, and working with the scientists who come in to use our facilities to help them solve problems. I enjoy working with other people and this job gives me a good opportunity to do that and for that to be valued, something that is often missing in university settings.

Let’s talk terminology for a moment. I noticed that Open Science people tend not to use the term, Science 2.0. Do you think Science 2.0 is a valid term with staying power or do you prefer the terms Open Science and/or online science?

Both “Open Science” (I actually prefer “Open Research” as it is more inclusive) and “Science 2.0” are good rallying points and give a broad impression of an idea, or even a sense of a movement. I guess as a scientist, though, I find them lacking precision and I’m conscious of the ability of imprecision to lead to problems. Science 2.0, like Web 2.0, is a fairly vague term with more risks than most. Do we mean that it is version 2.0 – in which case we would be safer talking about being currently at 1.5? Is it purely about Web 2.0 tools, and is it therefore set up in opposition to Semantic Web, sometimes called Web 3.0 technologies, which I think are crucial to taking the agenda forward?

I guess, overall, I am comfortable with using Open Science/Research to refer to a movement of people who are essentially heading in the same direction. Science (or Research) 2.0 doesn’t for me capture a clear enough image to be helpful. I prefer “web native” or “using what we’ve learnt from the web for science.”

Please tell us about Open Notebook Science. Is it possible that there could arise related movements such as Open Engineering in engineering education? Are there any such programs?

Open Notebook Science is two things: a process and a commitment. The commitment is that you make your best effort to make the full record of your research available as you record it; i.e. as close as possible to as it happens. In a sense this is an ideal rather than something that is practically achievable. There are always variables that you don’t record, indeed don’t think to record, the “unknown unknowns” of research. But the point is that you do the best that is feasible with the resources you have – at a minimum making sure that the record that you use and make is the one that is available to the rest of the world. The process is how you go about making this happen. It involves some use of web-based tools to make your record and put it online, but a lot of it is just about raising the standards of your record keeping.

There is a growing movement across education to provide more of the underlying materials, lecture notes, videos etc. best demonstrated by the MIT Open Courseware initiative. These tend to be about making available materials that already exist. In the Maker and DIY communities there is a lot of interest in sharing designs and experiences of building objects and tools as well as much of the sense of playfulness that also characterizes the record of science and for me this makes a closer analogy.

Is there much interaction between the uber geeks of Open Source and the more basic science lab guys of Open Notebook Science?

Relatively little. It is also important to make a distinction between the Open Source and the Free Software communities that have different aims and philosophical attitudes. In as much as Open Source software makes it easier to be an open researcher through standards and code sharing there is a logical connection. There are also philosophical parallels – that the most effective way of working is to allow others to be involved. Logistical connections as well because the challenges involved in getting Open Source projects to work in practice are similar to the issues you start to face when people, skilled or unskilled, want to contribute (or in some cases wreck) a scientific project.

There are connections and people like Egon Willighagen are strong proponents of both approaches. John Wilbanks has recently written some nice pieces on where the analogy between Open Code and Open Research breaks down. In many ways we have more to learn from the people who look closely at developing best practice in code development. People who work hard on understanding how to document code, how to most effectively get it written and reviewed, and how to educate people to do both the writing, recording, and documentation well. Greg Wilson is a standout contributor in this area.

What led you to decide to take up a leading role as an advocate for Open Science? Was there some epiphanic moment? Or did you just come over a period of years to realize that there had to be a better way to do science given the rise of Web technologies and ever cheaper forms of computing?

Hah. Funny story, which I’ve written about. Basically it was all down to an irritating corporate firewall that lead me in a fit of pique to say we were just going to make our online notebooks completely available. I guess I was primed to think that way by the online reading I’d started to do but really my own ideas only developed after I suddenly thought “actually that’s a bit radical, I wonder if anyone else has thought of this…”. Of course they had and that led me into the writing of and Peter Murray-Rust amongst others that developed my own thinking.

Could you tell us how you go about doing the following, “I largely focus my research work on methodology development and enabling others. I can potentially have a bigger impact by building systems and capabilities that help others do their research than I can by doing that research myself…”

I figure when it comes to the science there are people who can do it better than I can. Where I seem to be able to make the biggest difference is in helping others to do their science. So at STFC we are working towards developing new approaches to look at the structure of “difficult” proteins – that we hope will be useful to others. On a more prosaic level we just build up our own expertise to try and make sure that when users come in we ensure that their experiment works properly and that they can get their data analysed and published (that’s the aim anyway).

Finally, by doing this we show examples of little things that people can do. Maybe they don’t want to put everything online in a public way straight away but giving a working example of an online notebook means that people see it can be done – see the advantages and disadvantages and might choose to do that for themselves. Similarly by talking about using collaborative literature filtering and online services like Citeulike, Mendeley, and Zotero, it gives people a push to using those services which makes them better for everyone. This makes it important that all of these pieces of process, of practice, are useful in their own right and that they don’t have to be combined together to work.

You have been working a lot on Google Wave, for instance. Could you discuss that? How does it play into your statement here, for example, “…we need to build tools that make it easy to take those unstructured or semi-structure records and mold them into a specific structured narrative as part of a reporting process that the researcher has to do anyway. Writing a report, writing a paper. These things need to be done anyway and if we could build tools so that the easiest way to write the report or paper is to bring elements of the original record together and push those onto the web in agreed formats through easy to use filters and aggregators then we will have taken an enormous leap forward.”

Wave is suffering through a very accelerated hype cycle at the moment. What got me excited about it in the first place was really two specific things; the ability to automate the collection and capture of information in an environment which can feel to the user similar to a simple text entry; and the use of history as a way of dealing with the problems of provenance, who did what and when. We haven’t seen much technical development of the latter yet, but there is a lot of promise there for the future. It has been the capture of information that I’ve been mainly working on.

The idea is that you encourage them to put in a little effort, tagging or marking up their record, because they get a big return for it; ease of marking up next time, a complete searchable index of their work for free. This doesn’t have to be built in Wave; you can imagine doing something in Word, Excel, Open Office, Google Docs, Wikis, whatever. The difference for me is that Wave for the first time made it feasible for me to directly start building things that could be useful for other users. And that was what really excited me.

One of the things that struck me as I viewed Jean-Claude Bradley’s fascinating slideshow, “Leveraging Transparency and Crowdsourcing in Chemistry Using Open Notebook Science” is that the process delineated in it seemed to both facilitate the process of scientific discovery and perhaps at times to impede it given the many tools (wikis, Google Spreadsheets, YouTube, Second Life, etc.) that scientists now have to keep track of. Could you discuss some of your favorite tools and what tools are under development that could leverage the particular advantages of each? Is there some mega-platform under development that would address certain problems and what are those problems? Is Google Wave the answer? Is an answer really possible given that some tools are Open Source and some commercial?

It’s a real problem in two ways, first that with lots of different packages you inevitably hit cases where you can’t get information out of one and easily into another. This is why data portability and standards for import and export are so important. It’s a bit dull but in some ways data portability is more important than getting the data out – but we need critical mass of data to get the tools built and around we go in circles. I personally have no problem with a mixture of commercial and Open Source tools, I use what is most helpful to me at the time. But data portability is crucial – What Open Source gives me is some sort of guarantee that I can get my data back out again.

My hope is that Wave or something like it, some sort of aggregated inbox that can talk to all of these systems, or rather many of these that work in different ways to serve different people’s needs, will arrive and help us solve the problem. Sometimes it feels like we are at the stage of rubbing sticks together and hoping something will happen though.

You met a few months ago with Elsevier. Now, to many who are passionate about Open Access and of the school of Information Wants to be Free, Elsevier is the bloated, multinational, science-impeding devil incarnate. And yet here it was talking to you, Mr. Open Science. That was intriguing and a credit to Elsevier. Could you please tell us how and why they approached you and what your interactions were?

I was invited to what they called an “Ideation Workshop.. Essentially they got a group of internal people together from different groups, sales, IT, journals, many of whom had never met to talk about the long term strategy for their web services. I won’t talk about the details of what was discussed because I didn’t ask for permission to do so but in general terms they were engaged, interested, and looking at how to contribute to the long term future of both scholarly communication and its management, and the commercial health of the company.

What I said to them was essentially that they needed to ask themselves who their customers really were and where the opportunities to have viable long terms business models are. I started with the assumption that there will be a move towards more Open Access publication, driven by funders, and that there were simultaneously big commercial opportunities to be found in providing new types of services to research institutions, funders, and government. And that these opportunities depend on them getting Open Access to the literature…

Did you, for example, discuss with them their Article of the Future project and do you agree with John Wilbanks that there is very little that is transformative at all in the project?

Actually we didn’t talk about the “Article of the Future” – I’m not absolutely sure whether it was even out at that point. However, I do share John’s assessment. I think I was a bit more brutal at the time. Essentially all I saw was the article of the past…but on a web page. There were some nice presentational aspects and I liked the way “supplementary” information was promoted to having a place in the paper but my over-riding response was that what they’d done should have been trivial if the information was organized properly in the first place. If it wasn’t trivial there were more important problems to solve than presentational ones.

And speaking of the article of the future, do you think that perhaps the scholarly article in a way has no future or that it will become in only a few years time a perfunctory afterthought for a young scientist instead of the crucial career-making measure of accomplishment that it still is?

I think the role of the journal article in making a claim, or expressing an idea in human-readable form will remain important. But as the literature grows we need more effective ways to manage it, and we have to ask ourselves as a community whether we can afford it. More often than not when I read a paper I am looking for a single number, a link to a data file, or a single statement. My personal view is that we could lose maybe 90% of all published papers and simply put the data up with some methodological description on line. This would save billions, money that could then be spent on research.

The problem with this thinking is that these different costs are rarely tensioned together. No researcher ever has to make the choice of “do I spend $50k on a Nature paper or do I employ the postdoc for another year?” If people were having to make that choice on a regular basis I think pre-print archives would flourish.

After all, in the world that you and Jean-Claude Bradley seems to be actually creating, publication as we now know it is almost irrelevant given that much that is of interest in the sciences is now becoming available in many venues such as preprint sites like Nature Precedings.

For me the question is really about we do this in the most cost-effective manner while making sure the outputs of research are as available as possible. This means we need different types of “publication” for different types of output and different types of peer review at different stages. Again, until we are tensioning all the costs of research against each other I don’t really see this happening, and we will continue to pour taxpayers money down the drain.

Could the rise of Open Science actually benefit the mainstream publishers in that as processes and communications become ever more efficient and scientific networks expand, thereby pooling resources, the publishers may reap the benefit of ever greater amounts of science to publish? Or will they have to contend with the fact that the coming generation of researchers will become so used to such seamless science-making that they will scoff at the idea that they need to publish in a journal that only the richest of research libraries can afford? How do you see Open Science affecting the career paths, say, of young biochemists or neuroscientists? Are there some fields that are simply not suited to the world of Open Science such as many of those in the health sciences?

There are massive commercial opportunities in providing repositories and platforms to enable the publication and archival of research in its widest sense. Someone is going to make a killing on this by having the right platform to deliver what researchers and their funders need, when they realize they need it, and conventional publishers have a lot of expertise in building the tools and frameworks, and managing the infrastructure that can support these kinds of services.

I think there may be communities that are not suited to Open Science. I think we need to ask difficult questions about privacy and the rights of test subjects. But issues of privacy are much bigger than just those around Science; perhaps they are the major social issue we need to face up to in the Western World over the next decade. So there are special cases where data cannot be made open and probably should not be made open, but they are special cases, and not the default.

Could you please compare and contrast the attitudes and successes of Elsevier, Springer and Nature Publishing Group vis-à-vis adapting to the pressure from researchers and even now the general public for greater employment of the principles of Open Access?

At a corporate level I don’t think any of these organizations are adapting or making opportunities for themselves. I think they are responding and trying to manage those changing expectations without undergoing radical change that would be required to respond positively. That said, within all of these organizations there are people who understand the promise and opportunity of OA, but large organizations change slowly. BMC seems to be doing well inside of Springer, but it remains to be shown that this is more than a side experiment for the parent company. NPG are probably the most productively engaged with the whole agenda of improving scholarly communication but even there, they will only accede to non-commercial licences for their so-called OA offering. A case of offering just enough to keep the crowd happy rather than taking the opportunity of stealing a march on the competition.

You say, “The journal used to play an important role in publication. The publisher still has an important role but we need to step outside the notion of the journal and present different types of content and objects in the best way for that set of objects.” Will it become the case that scientists could simply start purchasing what we might call nano-content? To wit, just the conclusion of a full article or a single graph or chart from one? Do you see the publishers going for such a model on the premise that some revenue out of an article is better than none or will they balk at the idea of making peanuts on piecemeal distribution of bits and pieces of what they can, as things stand now, potentially sell for a hefty sum as a whole, intact object?

There is an alternative to the OA model, and that is the micro-payments model in which the researcher has their own budget and pays small amounts for what they need. An iTunes for science if you like. But by analogy with the music industry if this was the way forward then you can imagine peer to peer sharing of purchased content being very popular. And DRM for science is bad news. It’s bad news anyway but the whole point of getting research content is so you can build on it. Making that difficult would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Now I am going to put you on the spot and ask you to help readers gain a grasp of who is who in Open Science and what the particular strengths of and accomplishments of each are.

Let’s start with John Wilbanks. Could you please delineate for us the relationship of Science Commons to Open Science? Wilbanks seems to an interesting bridging figure between the world of Open Science, Open Access, the whole world of the idea of an information commons, big data and Web 2.0. Do you interact with him much and where do your interests and views intersect and diverge?

John is the figure who perhaps more than anyone else has driven forward the discussion and ideas around the high level of issues of policy and practice as well as actively pushing forward with specific projects. The success of Science Commons is getting exemplar projects moving forward, such as the SAGE project, is largely due to John’s boundless energy and enthusiasm. Mostly we intersect when we happen to be at the same meeting. I’m in strong agreement with John about most things. Perhaps we were diverge somewhat is that he is a stronger proponent of “core” semantic web approaches whereas I would characterize myself more as feeling that we will be able to work with a more flexible range of technologies. But it’s a very minor difference.

Michael Nielsen. Is he more of a theorist and explicator and less of a hands-on scientist than you and Jean-Claude Bradley?

Michael definitely comes from a theoretical background which brings another perspective. It isn’t clear to me for instance that the idea of an Open Notebook evens makes sense for a theoretician. I don’t really have a clear enough idea of how they work on a day to day basis. At the same time Michael is far and away the most conventionally successful scientist who is an active proponent of Open Notebook style approaches. The fact that he has largely moved away from active research to focus on trying to change the practice of science sends a very strong message. I sometimes wish I had the courage to follow that example.

Jean-Claude Bradley. How do you two resemble one another? I would say that you blog more extensively in the scientific essay mode a la Michael Nielsen and that Bradley tends to be a bit more utilitarian in his approach. Am I close here?

Jean-Claude is the real originator and driving force behind the Open Notebook movement. I guess we are similar in our approximate career stages and we have some cross over in terms of research interests. Jean-Claude takes a much more direct and immediate approach to his work, using tools and services that are available and taking a very strong approach to requiring that those are freely available. He also seem to have a lot more energy than I do!

I think if you were to characterize the difference between us it would be the Jean-Claude is much more focused on outcomes and immediate returns whereas I am more interested in process. This means that he gets on and uses what is available to make things happen. I tend to be more interested in (and get more frustrated about) building tools for further down the line. We have some slight philosophical differences in that I think I am more gung-ho about favouring policy changes that push researchers harder in the open direction but these are shaded differences of emphasis rather than big differences.

Bora Zivkovic

Bora is the uber-science blogger. He is one of the longest serving science bloggers with the biggest following. He has been a long term ideological supporter of Open Access and open movements. I think he has a much more political and policy orientation than most of the rest of us do.

Rich Apodaca

Rich I know mostly through his writing on Depth-First and the development of various tools, most recently ChemPedia and its associated Stack Overflow-based site ChemPedia Labs. Mostly my interactions with Rich involve one of his tightly written blog posts that crystallize an idea, often around practice or scholarly publication. Two posts that stand out for me was one on the Seven Deadly Sins of scientific publication (practice?) and things he wrote about micropublication.

Bill Hooker

When I first started reading stuff online Bill was one of the very early people I came across (along with Jean-Claude, Deepak, and Neil Saunders). His three part series on 3 Quarks Daily was a very strong early influence on my thinking. He is one of the most active and vociferous advocates of open practice around. I once jokingly characterized him as “Bradley’s Bulldog.. Probably more than anyone else Bill has taken the fight to the online trenches, arguing the case in forums and blogs.

Antony Williams of ChemSpider

Antony again is one of these people with apparently boundless energy who just keeps getting on and doing things. He spent years pushing his personal vision of an online resource for chemists forward with little or no funding spending vast amounts of time on it. Now that Chemspider has been purchased by the Royal Society of Chemistry and he has more resource and stability you might think he would take a rest and sit back a bit but he seems to be pushing forward and in the air travelling even more than he was before.

Antony is a do-er. Again a bit like Jean-Claude he will take what is available and make things happen. He is less interested in the technical and sometimes ideological issues that rage around licences, databases, and information structures and more focused on building an end product that people can use. This can and does lead him into conflict sometimes with people that are more worried about other aspects of the problem, but we need that diversity of approaches and services if we want jam today as well as tomorrow. Bottom line, Tony makes stuff happen.

Deepak Singh

Deepak again was one of the people online that I came across very early and had a strong influence on my thinking, particularly on tools, technical issues, and systems design. Also simply in the way he presents himself online. He has one of the most effective and coherent online personas I’ve come across. His experience and approach is more commercially oriented than mine so pay very close attention when he writes and speaks about issues around intellectual property and commercial practice.

We probably differ in our stance around patent law and intellectual property, not because we fundamentally disagree about any principles, we both want to see the most effective conversion of research into valuable innovation, but because of our background and experiences.

Andrew Lang

Andy I first came across as Hiro Sheridan in Second Life and it took me a while to make the connection. He has been really instrumental in creating a lot of the imagery that has supported a range of projects. He is a dab hand at pulling together rapid and lightweight visualizations of data using a wide range of tools. Again there is a focus on making stuff happen. His background in maths and computing has made it possible to turn a lot of things around very fast. Particularly in combination with Rajarshi Guha who did a lot of the development of chemoinformatics services that support every aspect of the Open Notebook Solubility Project he is one of the team that have turned perhaps rather dry lists of numbers into compelling visualizations.

and the up and comer Steve Koch

Koch has been a real breath of fresh air and has brought new energy into the whole community. As a new tenure track academic he is really putting everything on the line and pushing the envelope on Open Notebook Approaches. I have thought for a while that ONS approaches would be most risky for new academics and that therefore they would be unlikely to take this approach. I am delighted that he is proving me wrong on a daily basis.

I should also mention that he has a young and extremely energetic research group that are really backing him up and are also gung-ho on Open Science. Anthony Salvagno, Andy Maloney, Larry Herskowitz, Brian Josey and the others are all energetic, positive, and getting out there to make more of their science available.

and Shirley Wu who, given her job at 23andMe , is a fascinating example of how the coming cohort of scientists and technologists interested in Open Science are becoming figures of note in related areas such as Health 2.0 and in the commercial sector.

Shirley first got in touch with me via my blog when she was a PhD student in Russ Altmann’s lab at Stanford, with the suggestion of running an Open Science session at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. She did most of the running on this, writing up the report, being far more successful than me at getting sponsorship and generally pulling everything together to make it happen.

She has been both a great thinker and articulator of ideas on her blog and although her writing has been more focused recently on writing on the Spittoon at 23andMe on specific genetic issues I think she has a great future writing more generally about science and how it is carried out. I certainly hope that she continues to write about her ideas and opinions in that area.

Have I missed any major figures?

Other people I should mention as both major players and influences are Peter Murray-Rust, who is one of the most sustained and energetic fighters for Open Access and Open Research around. He has been a bit less active in the blogosphere recently because of the large number of big projects he is involved in. In his group at Cambridge both Jim Downing and Nico Adams have been pushing on the tools front for a long time.

In terms of influence there are far too many people to mention. I often think I have no ideas of my own, I merely synthesize the ideas of others. So all the past and current people on Friendfeed, Twitter, and online more generally make a big difference, sometimes in small pieces and sometimes in larger ones.

Could you comment on the role that search might play in Open Science? For instance, does Wolfram|Alpha hold any particular interest for you or do you think it was much overhyped?

Search is crucial for the success of Open Science. As we put more stuff online it has to be possible to find it. This means developments in semantic search, as well as improved computational engines like Wolfram Alpha. WA is an impressive piece of technology but from my perspective it has a fatal flaw. It only works on the curated information that is in their database. This has two problems – a lot of the chemistry in their is simply wrong or badly misleading. Various of us have reported problems, but I’ve seen little progress on this. But fundamentally if we don’t know what the root data is or its source then it is of little use to the wider research community where provenance is everything.

The second problem is related but slightly different. Because it is a curated database there is absolutely no way it can keep up with what we are generating. Now if WA could work over my data then I would be interested in formatting it in the correct way. But since it can’t there is little point. Until WA can be connected to a data aggregator that spiders the web I think it will be a useful tool for a few things but mainly a toy. If it can use the whole web as a database then things become very very interesting.

Where are we on the purchase of FriendFeed by FaceBook? Many of the members of FriendFeed (including yourself) seemed concerned that much of the accumulated knowledge in the science-focused rooms therein would be lost to the community. What do you see as the future of FriendFeed under FaceBook?

I can’t see that FriendFeed has a long term future in its current form as essentially the ex-project of the FaceBook development team. We are already seeing things take a long time to fix or problems (like the broken search) just not being fixed. I think we’re on the long slide down to oblivion. The question is, how long?

There are a lot of good ideas out there. I’m not worried about whether we could build something if we needed to. What I am worried about is how we could fund that work.

Speaking of FaceBook, do you have any comment on the supposed showdown over the future of the Internet vis-à-vis the more gated community orientation of FaceBook versus the freer orientation of Google? Bets on who will win or is such a duel genuinely in the offing? Implications for Open Science?

Apparently there is a whole generation who think FaceBook is the internet. I think in the end open wins out, the bigger system, with greater diversity and greater ability to create new systems wins. That’s true when there is real diversity and competition. A good question is whether it remains true when one system captures the majority of the market. Internet Explorer is losing market share even though it had enormous penetration. But equally Chrome is struggling somewhat even with the might of Google behind it. And if Google aren’t supporting Mozilla then can Firefox survive?

I want to believe that open always wins in the end. Sometimes I fear that my conclusions are being driven by my wishes rather than the evidence, though.

You use Twitter, but you don’t seem to have written much about it. Do you see it as having much of a role to play in Open Science? Jean-Claude Bradley does not seem to have mentioned it as one of the many tools employed by the scientists engaged in the project he discusses in the slideshow mentioned above, “Leveraging Transparency and Crowdsourcing in Chemistry Using Open Notebook Science.” Whom do you regard as must-follows on Twitter? What Twitter tools do you use?

I use Twitter largely as a way of tracking a somewhat different community of people to that I find on Friendfeed. I don’t get much “real science” out of Twitter. It is more about staying in contact with the IT and UK information management communities. I think in most cases the tool is close to irrelevant; it’s the community that matters. To the extent that the tool matters it is because of the way it supports the formation and management of the communities relevant to you, not the functionality itself.

In terms of information gathering the person I get the most from on Twitter is Glyn Moody, but to be honest I could cope if it closed tomorrow. I use Twhirl to follow on my laptop and Seesmic on my phone.

On a related note, what do you see as the future of RSS?

RSS, or rather feeds in general are key to the future of information management in my view. ATOM is more powerful and flexible but doesn’t need to worry the user too much, ATOMPub is a great protocol for pushing information as well. Feeds can go in both directions. Going forward we will also see more real time “feeds” using push protocols like XMPP. But at the bottom my entire world view is about manipulating feeds of information and objects: controlling which ones come to me and deciding how to deal with them and pushing out other feeds of content I’ve touched, used, or created.

Where are we with the matter of Open Science logos and how crucial do you think that matter is?

Clarity is really important when you are saying what you intend to do and how to do it and in that sense I think logos are really useful. They also, by the use of trademarks, let you define standards and aggregate communities around statements of purpose or ideals. The great success of Creative Commons is that they’ve created both a community and a clear statement that is wrapped up in a couple of logos that (to some extent at least) have clear understood intentions. If we can achieve this for Open Notebook Science then I think that would be a great thing.

Which brings us to the question of why I haven’t used them I guess…Simple answer is that I don’t have access to the style sheets that drive my lab notebook. This is a surprisingly general problem – and also applies to licences. I want to put up some data, so I do it on some service, but that service doesn’t let me put a ccZero licence (e.g. FeedBurner doesn’t have the ability to apply ccZero to your feed although you can use CC-BY). If I don’t have the ability to add it how can I express my wishes? However, that excuse is running a little thin because I’ve learnt enough about stylesheets that I could probably do it now…

How do Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas about the Semantic Web fit into Open Science? Do you take issue with any of his pronouncements and positions?

I absolutely believe in the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data as the way to move forward for describing the outputs of research in the lab. I guess I have two slight differences with TBL. Firstly I am not sure that an exclusive focus on RDF is the best way forward because there is some mileage in other formats that are widely used. They are not as good in the longer term, but they might make a good stepping stone for many cases and we need to solve the problem of transferring lots of legacy data as well.

Where I have a different emphasis to many SemWeb people is that I think our biggest problem is providing tools that capture information and build the links. Generating linked data seems to largely involve a lot of typing of angle brackets or mastering complex software libraries. This is nonsense if we’re going to produce large quantities of linked data. We need tools that help the average user, the average scientist generate and publish data in this form without them having to worry about the details. If it’s further away than a right click then it isn’t going to happen.

If you were to win a MacArthur fellowship, how would you spend the money?

I have to say I’m not actually sure exactly what you get for a MacArthur fellowship but I was thinking about putting in for an ERC Senior Fellowship so let me describe what I was thinking about for that.

Third, get right into the social sciences and look hard at what is happening around us. Really look hard at the different online tools, figure out what is working and what is not, and try to understand why. Look for historical parallels that will help to predict the best way forward. Get a real understanding of the social sciences that can help me to understand developments and push them in the right direction. Get real evidence of what open practices are achieving, and where they work best. Find the low hanging fruit and apply resources where they are most likely to find the big wins.

What is your goal for the next year? The next five?

This year it is to make sure I get you these answers before the year is up! Seriously this year my goals are the same as last year, to make more space and time and find the resources to do some of the things above somehow. Over five years, really the same. I would like to have made a significant impact, for the better, on the way scientists work over that period.

Who are you heroes in science, technology and in any other field on endeavor?

The people who make a difference. I’m not sure I really do have heroes per se. I admire people who think clearly, and who influence my thinking in positive ways but that’s a little circular. As a scientist I guess I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of placing too much of an aura around the person rather than the work. To the extent that I have heroes many of them are the people mentioned above. The ones who have motivated me, through their ideas or their example, to try and make a difference where I can.

You and I both recently attended ScienceOnline2010. Do you consider that a must-attend event for those interested in Open Science? Can you tell us a bit about how you think your own sessions went, which presentations you found most compelling, whom you got a chance to chat with there that you already knew and what new people you met there that interested and impressed you?

I was very happy with the Open Notebook session that I was involved with and less happy with the Wave demo. In retrospect I probably should have shown the canned video demo that I had rather than try and do it live, which is a lesson I will take to other demos. I was really disappointed that I missed sessions by Andy Farke, Pavel Szczesny, Jon Eisen and many others. There was just far too much good stuff going on. I think Science Online is growing into a must-attend event for those interested in how scientific communication is evolving in its widest sense.

For me, I guess I came away with a couple of key ideas about how to distribute data in new ways and a greater appreciation of the challenges of curation in the longer term. But also the potential for connecting things together – a lot of this seems nearly in reach if we could just figure out how to bridge a few more gaps.

Also, some of the librarians at ScienceOnline2010 came away with the impression that some scientists regard libraries as we know them to be increasingly irrelevant. Do you have any suggestions as to how librarians can play a role in Open Science?

The role of “the library” in the 21st century is a source of angst for many people. The broader question really is how do we want to manage information in academia in the future, and what spaces, real or virtual, need to be provided for people to interact with information. A lot of this is virgin territory, so there are massive opportunities for the people and communities who want to get out there and make things happen. Equally, a lot of it is unfamiliar territory for librarians and other information managers. Life is like that.

The other important role is to take a much stronger advocacy role in explaining the true costs of current subscription systems. A central problem with our current structure is that academics are blinded to the costs of their publishing decisions. I think librarians need to be radicalized to take on their own academic staff and make them see and feel the costs of their decisions. I can see that this is both dangerous and scary and also a departure from the traditionally subservient role of library decision making to academic need. But if the current fear is a lack of relevance, then maybe some pain is required to make it clear what the relevance is?

What conferences do you recommend those interested in Open Science attend and where do you plan to appear in coming months? I am looking forward to hearing you speak at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest February 20, 2010, for instance.

That’s a hard question – Open Science seems to exist on the periphery of mainstream conferences and at the same time to a certain extent in a ghetto of its own. The Science Commons Symposium will be great – and I’m really excited to be there. The Science Online London and Science Online 2011 meetings will be important marking points to look at progress. The SAGE Congress in April in San Francisco will be an exciting place to talk about what is possible today and into the future. But the place to really progress the discussion about Open Science is in the mainstream – by standing up in a conference and giving a talk…and providing a link to the data. By making the underlying code and analysis available and saying so in the paper. By simply raising the bar for what we expect from the communication of good science. Ask the questions – demand the answers and live it out with your own communication to the best of your ability and change Open Science from an activity practiced by fringe lunatics into nothing more than the good practice that we expect.

Thank you for your time, Cameron.

I came to learn of you as I have been trying, as the saying goes, to “wrap my head around” the concepts of Open Science, Open Notebook Science and what seems to be a genuine revolution in scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific information. I have come in the past year or so to learn that there is a core group of people in the vanguard of this movement including Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Andrew Lang, Michael Nielsen and you.

Open Science seems to me to be a genuinely transformative movement in not only science but in the information sciences and should be of interest to anyone with an interest in scientific research, scientific publishing, academia, scholarly communication, search engines, the relationship of new technologies to mainstream scientific societies, technological innovation, the Semantic Web, big data, social networking in the sciences, new tools for scientific and scholarly collaboration and so on. And throw in the fact that you have managed to create something important with very little (if any) grant funding that caught the attention of and was acquired by the prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry.

We actually did it without any grant funding. ChemSpider was originally started as a hobby project so looking for grant-funding to fund a hobby project per se wouldn’t have been a good basis for any agency to contribute. Can you imagine that exchange with the NSF… “It’s something we’re interested in doing for the benefit of the community so would you mind kicking in a few dollars to cover the costs at least?” A discussion destined for failure. Even much later when we were listed on grant applications with collaborators we unfortunately didn’t get any funding. We did, however, have a number of companies step forward and sponsor the site because we were doing something of value for them, especially when we provided access to the data via a series of web services. Specifically Waters, Thermo, Agilent and Bruker all contributed and we thank them for that. It helped pay for the hardware!

Thus, we have in you we have the story of a basic scientist who also succeeded as a Web entrepreneur on the strength of a way cool tool and the respect you garnered as a scientist and innovator.

Thanks for the kudos. While I am a scientist I think my role over the past decade has been “Idea Guy” and “Connector,” connector being the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the word (The Tipping Point). I know a lot of very able people who are willing to move from the talking stage of doing something to actually getting it done. I’m very opinionated regarding when there is enough talking and thinking about doing something and it’s time to get things done. As I like to say “Try to feed the dog and the dog dies. If you ACTUALLY feed the dog he’ll be fine….but if you only TRY he won’t be.” Over the years I’ve developed a fairly good batting average in terms of starting a project, iterating, revisiting progress, stopping if necessary and redirecting as necessary. It’s my preferred way of working. It’s much easier to run a project this way outside of a structured organization, of course.

I envision as readers of this article all those who are, like me, trying to get a grasp of who’s who in Open Science, anyone who cares about the future of science (and that really should include every human being given the importance science plays a role in practically every breath we take, how long we live and like matters), plus medical, scientific and academic librarians, science educators at all levels, information scientists, computer science students with start-up stars in their eyes, those who love chemistry, those who need to keep up on key developments in the world of search and those who want to gain a better understanding of rather arcane terms such as “the Semantic Web.”

I agree with you…Science touches us all. I was listening today to President Obama commenting about how the USA is lagging behind on math and science skills. I have to agree. I’m British by birth and didn’t get to the states until I was in my early 20s but I’ve been here almost a quarter of a century now and I have sensed a change in the interest in science. We do amazing science in this country, just incredible. I get to meet a lot of kids but I can’t think of one who thinks its “cool and interesting” that I am scientist. Maybe it’s because I don’t mix chemicals anymore and don’t make “stuff.” Science isn’t exposed to the public the way it used to be in my opinion. I think there are a lot of people trying to interest students and making sincere efforts, but I am hoping that the new administration will shine more of a spotlight on the issue of lagging math and science skills and DO something to change it.

One of the pleasures of conducting interviews with brilliant people who create pathbreaking tools is that I get the opportunity to grill them on matters of terminology.

In that tradition, I would like to ask you first to give us a very simple explanation of what ChemSpider is and why non-chemists should know about it. For example, I work in the biomedical sciences and for my own interest follow research developments in the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Much of the work on that disease involves the testing of various chemicals on mouse models to see if they have any effect on preventing or curing the disease or slowing its development. Now, I would think that tools that greatly expedite the work of chemists at a very basic level would benefit clinical researchers down the road. Could you please outline for us why average people who are ill or love people who are should care about ChemSpider and the wider world of Open Science? Does chemistry really matter to those of us who aren’t chemists?

I’ll break this into pieces to answer your questions. Firstly, what is ChemSpider? At present it is primarily a large database of chemicals and related data linked out to the original sources of the data. What we’re been working towards is having ChemSpider be a “structure-centric” resource. If you want to find information associated with a chemical structure/compound and you know either its name(s) or its chemical structure then you can search the database and find associated information and data. The data are of various forms and include lists of chemical identifiers, experimental and predicted properties, analytical data, textual descriptions including synthesis procedures and Wikipedia articles, links to related information and data sources.

In terms of “Does chemistry really matter to those of us who aren’t chemists?” that parallels questions such as “Should we care about Mathematics? Who cares about art or literature?”. While there are of course many issues and side effects of chemistry that have been detrimental to the health of the planet “chemists and chemistry” will be at the forefront of healing the harm we have done. Whether the public are conscious of it or not chemistry continues to bring benefits to society in so many ways in the form of drugs, novel materials for a myriad of applications, for green applications such as battery technologies, biodegradable polymers, safer pesticides, fertilizers and so on. These examples are ones that the public would easily recognize. Chemistry is everywhere and it should matter to all of us.

Now let’s move along to questions of terminology. As I have read around on the Web in preparation for this interview, I have seen ChemSpider characterized in various ways. Could you please define for us the terms I have come across in articles about ChemSpider?

Structure Centric Community
Chemical compounds encompass a broad distribution. There are those that have been fully characterized and defined and can be represented in terms of a chemical structure diagram and in our specific case in the form of a “connection table” of atoms and bonds. There are then those chemicals that are materials with specific compositions, for example minerals, or a distributed composition, for example polymers with a distribution of molecular weights and end groups. ChemSpider presently is limited to dealing with “structures” that can be represented with a connection table. The community aspect is twofold: ChemSpider as a resource is provided for the benefit of the community but we also intend for the community to participate in the enhancement of the data quality and content.

Database
ChemSpider sits of a database of diverse data associated with millions of chemical structures. The database itself is Microsoft SQL Server and what we have done is built a data model onto SQL server and populated the database with chemistry-related content.

As you can see, I am trying to figure out when something is a database and when it is a search engine. I work very happily on ScanGrants, but I still can’t figure out if it is a database or a search engine. We just use the wording, “a public service listing of grants and other funding types.” Could you please delineate for us the differences between a search engine and a database and is ChemSpider both depending on what operation the user is engaged in within it? Could you please give examples of what you would consider a database and what you would consider a search engine?

Interesting question. I think of a database as two things – the technology itself that hosts the content (in our case the database in SQL server) and then the data model and the data populated against the data model. Clearly SQL Server itself is unlikely to be of interest to chemists unless it is holding data of interest to them. A search engine is the manner by which people discover content and relationships that is generally, but not always housed within a database. The utility of ChemSpider is not just limited to searching a database as the platform provides access to a number of tools for the user that still have high value and do not involve performing searches or tapping into the existing data content. For example, we have a services page where a user can draw their own structure (or upload it) and predict a series of physicochemical properties for their structure. This does not depend on the structure being in the database as they are real time predictions and not data look-ups.
Examples of various databases would be eBay, Amazon and Wikipedia – they are all sitting on underlying database technologies and the user is interested in the content within. Clearly they all need to be searchable to retrieve information of interest to the user but they are not search engines per se. To me search engines are the classical internet search engines: Google, Bing and I extend it to include Mapquest/Google Earth.

In your very edifying slideshow, “How Internet Resources Are Providing a Collaborative Community for Chemistry” you have an intriguing slide entitled, “Crowd-sourcing chemistry curation.” Could you please talk about crowd-sourcing in chemistry and tell us if there is something unique to chemistry that makes it particularly suitable to crowd-sourcing or are you with ChemSpider and with your colleagues such as Jean-Claude Bradley creating models of collaboration that could be adopted by other branches of science? It does seem to me that Open Science at this point is of interest primarily to chemists and physicists. Will that always be the case or is there activity in fields such as neuroscience and medicine?

In terms of crowd-sourcing in chemistry our hope is that we can garner the support of the community to populate ChemSpider with their own content so that others can benefit from their skills and interests, the so-called “wisdom of the crowd.” However, since there is already so much data and information on ChemSpider we are also hoping that the community will help us validate and curate the data that is on ChemSpider. With over 20 million chemical entities on the database, many associated with dozens of names and properties, it is not difficult to find a simple misspelling, a property without units or a mis-associated spectrum. This amounts to millions of potential errors that cannot be validated algorithmically or robotically and human eyeballs and skills need to be brought to bear.

Jean-Claude Bradley, JC, is at the forefront of Open Notebook Science and is instigating projects that harness the collective skills of students to measure, publish and collectively validate experimental data. In particular this has been brought to bear recently in his Open Solubility Project where a number of individuals are measuring non-aqueous solubility experimental data and sharing the details and results of their measurements via a wiki. The data are then aggregated and served up the community to reuse and repurpose. Since all experimental data are available via links to the original measurement data, true Open Notebook Science, then erroneous results can be questioned, discussed by the community and highlighted for re-measurement or investigation. JC’s work in this particular area is unique but Open Science has been going on for many years in astronomy where large teams openly share datasets and collaborate. If you consider biology this is already going on through the sharing of massive amounts of biological assay screening data through the PubChem platform. In this way certain labs are screening particular compounds and making the data available and other laboratories are accessing the data and using it to investigate potential lead compounds. The same is true of the Toxcast work funded by the environmental protection agency (EPA) where there screening data are being made available to modelers to investigate algorithm development for example. Open Science is all around us today and only continues to grow in parallel with other areas of openness – Open Source and Open Access.

In that same slideshow, you use the rather intriguing term “lost chemistry.” Please elaborate on that.

I originally heard the term “Lost Chemistry” from a gentleman called Dick Wife. Dick has been running a project for a few years to aggregate from chemistry theses synthetic reaction procedures to build a large database of chemical syntheses. For every published chemical reaction there are many more syntheses reporting the experimental conditions, yields and analytical data that never make it outside of the originating laboratory but can be captured into a thesis. Dick has been heading a project called SORD to aggregate these data into a single database and make it available to the community. If you wish to have free access to the resource then you need to be a participating lab and share your data so that it can be populated into SORD. If you wish to access the data but not be an active contributor then you need to pay to access. This helps capture a lot of “Lost Chemistry.” As an NMR spectroscopist I have the same view of the number of spectra measured in a year around the world that never get reported and simply remain confined to hard drives inside an organization. We hope that people will take advantage of the ChemSpider platform to share their data and help prevent the “loss” of chemistry. Imagine how many experiments have been run in labs around the world where the data/description/conclusions are lost in notebooks on a shelf. I am not talking about long-lost information but data generated in the past couple of years where computer capture and data management capabilities could have helped expose the information. This will change. What we need to catalyze the shift is a couple of prominent thought-leaders in our domain to lead the way.

Again in that slideshow, you state, “ChemSpider accepts public depositions, linking to websites, hosting of details etc. Accepts structures, text, spectra, images.” Could you please give examples of each and discuss the challenges of quality control? How do you handle matters of link rot, for example? How has the acquisition of ChemSpider by the RSC helped you in such matters?

I think I’ve outlined earlier the concept of depositing information onto ChemSpider. We do have people submitting their own chemicals to the database now, regular associations of chemicals with publications, association of spectra etc. We have over 2500 spectra at this point. Quality control is rather simple but is hard work for a number of curators. We have different levels of curators and master curators check the curation efforts of members of the community who are depositing and validating data. Spectra are generally checked within a few hours of being deposited, images are generally checked within a few minutes, chemical names are re-checked within a day etc. Simple comments submitted against chemical records are available for everyone to see and the thousands of historical comments made are all viewable. Bottom line, we recheck everything. We have only had a couple of acts of vandalism and it amounted to people posting funny images (for example, the Katie Crowe incident or the Exploding Mouse). I’d estimate well over 95% of the edits and depositions are correct associations. I would say that 99% of the comments raise appropriate awareness to us regarding issues on a particular record. Overall, this is very impressive.

Link rot is an issue but we try to minimize it. For example, we link as many publications as possible via PubMed ID or, preferably, digital object identifier (DOI) and then use those identifiers to pull back the associated information via the appropriate services. We are at risk of broken links with things like blog posts but we tend to consult the blog for creative commons licensing and respect it, often depositing a relevant blog post onto the database and creating the link out to the originating blog post. If the blog changes later and there is no redirect then we at least do have the original source info on the database to load. Link rot is something we are trying to wrap our head around and in terms of data we foresee that application of DOIs for data, as Thieme have done recently for spectral data, could be an important approach.

You also say, “Blogs should be searchable too.” Are blogs (which can be deleted in seconds by the owners) some of the places that lost chemistry can be found? Are Open Notebooks basically blogs? Or are they wikis? Or what?

There are some wonderful blogs out there for synthetic chemists especially. I like the blog of Paul Docherty and “Milkshake” who runs the Org Prep Daily blog. Paul’s blog is generally a detailed analysis of a particular synthesis with links to the original paper. Milkshake posts details of particular syntheses and a lot of experimental detail. We copy the contents of both to ChemSpider and link out to the original posts. I would call this Lost Chemistry….many people had never heard of these blogs until I started pointing to them. I believe we have driven traffic to them. Open Notebooks could be blogs (like OrgPrepDaily) but in the pure sense of the definition from JC Bradley the wiki format with date and time increments displayed throughout the progress of the work is more appropriate. I would say most ONS pages are wiki-based at present.

One new buzzword is “Linked Data.” Is ChemSpider an exemplar of that concept? How does linked data differ from semantic linking?

For the purists I believe that Linked Data is the exposure of data using semantic web layers such as RDF (Resource Description Framework). For myself I believe that ChemSpider is indeed an example of Linked Data even in its present form. We are not yet exposing RDF on ChemSpider but have had it on our plans to do so. There is, (un)fortunately, always something else waiting for our attention.

In your very interesting slideshow, “Navigating the Complex Web of Chemistry Using ChemSpider,” you state on one slide, “Publishers can enhance their articles…” Could you please elaborate on that and tell us what you see as the value of Elsevier’s Article of the Future project?

The publishers are not naïve in thinking that “publications” are paper-based for not very much longer. So much of their delivery vehicles have had to be reinvented over the past few years as users have come to expect access to electronic forms of the article ahead of paper-based delivery. The American Chemical Society just this year announced the first step to migrate away from paper-based delivery and I’m not aware of any of the Open Access journals delivering a paper-based format. A number of the publishers are already active with delivering enhancements to the articles that can only come by enabling electronic forms of the article. I include the efforts of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). In Chemistry especially the RSC led the cure with their award-winning Project Prospect semantic mark-up project whereby certain terms within the article would be “marked-up” and linked to information such as chemical compound details, definitions in the IUPAC Gold Book etc. The ChemSpider team developed our own version of semantic mark-up, called ChemMantis, and linked out from chemical names, reaction names and biological entities such as proteins, enzymes, bacteria etc out to the associated Wikipedia record. We used the ChemSpider database as the navigating layer to help link from chemical compounds out to chemical vendors, analytical data and related publications. We ended up producing a “ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry” to house Open Access articles submitted to us by the community. Many of these were synthesis procedures and took advantage of our mark-up capabilities to enhance the article.

I believe that Elsevier’s Article of the Future could be a good representation of what electronic articles might look like in the future. I can only envision that the production of such articles will be very labor-intensive for the foreseeable future until processes are optimized and authors assume more of the additional load associated with producing an electronic article of that form. Alternatively, and more likely, an increasing amount of the article formatting will be farmed out overseas due to a more advantageous price point.

What is the ChemSpider Synthesis and what do you mean by “all things synthetic?”

One of the outcomes of our delivery of the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry was a series of submissions of synthesis procedures. By the third issue it was clear that there was a bias to using the platform to expose organic syntheses – short articles explaining particular reaction transformations…generally single step syntheses defining starting materials, products, experimental conditions and associated analytical data. Ultimately, it was turning into a “reaction database” of synthesis procedures. Our intention with ChemSpider Synthesis, an interim name for what we will deliver, will host short articles regarding synthesis. They will be peer-reviewed using a blog-like feedback system where comments will be posted to the article. The community will be asked to contribute to the content and, in parallel, we will harvest synthesis procedures from the RSC archive of many tens of thousands of articles.

Could you please discuss the concept of public peer review and how might that change the current quite rigid tenure system? How do you encourage young scientists to get involved in Open Science in general and ChemSpider in particular? Jean-Claude Bradley seems to excel at outreach to chemistry faculty and young scientists and you to scientific societies, database managers in government and industry and to publishers.

Public peer review is, in many ways, already happening. The blogosphere has fast become an environment where science and publications are openly discussed and critiqued in the public eye. Take for example the recent blog discussions regarding sodium hydride as an oxidant that were conducted on the TotallySynthetic Blog . This blog post openly critiqued science reported in JACS and in the process removed the journal and the authors from the exchange. Since such “peer review” is already occurring online, and the example given is not the only one, the near future will see peer review and commentaries being posted directly to a publication online similar to what we are seeing already in the blogosphere. Authors will be held accountable to their work not only by original peer reviewers but also by the community at large. This will take some gentle navigation in the early days to deal with potential flame wars and open attacks but ultimately is likely to become mainstream and expected from the publishers. Personally I believe it will be quite some time before such openness will have an impact on the tenure system and such a system is entrenched, in my opinion, in local organization politics and relationships over productivity and scientific impact. At the end of the day interpersonal relationships and conformance to an organization’s expectations and needs will define tenure conversion.

Speaking of Jean-Claude Bradley, could you please give us your views as to who excels at what vis-à-vis raising the public profile of Open Science? Do you agree with my characterizations here:

Jean-Claude Bradley: The main conduit and public face of Open Science to working chemists in academia. Ambassador and guide to Open Science to non-scientists. Explicator extraordinaire on the actual practices and value of Open Science and Open Notebook Science in particular.

JC is like the “billboard of ONS” and I mean that in a positive way. He speaks from the heart regarding his passion for ONS, he demonstrates true value and benefits to the approach, has brought together a team of disparate collaborators to produce demonstrations regarding what openness, services and a willing group of people can produce as an outcome. JC focuses his efforts on spreading the word, takes no offense when people don’t support the direction and knows that, ultimately, ONS will have a growing prominence in the future.

Cameron Neylon: Tools meister and theory man. Connector to industry (e.g., Google vis-à-vis Google Wave, and Elsevier.) Tireless and charismatic advocate and astute analyst of key developments in Open Science.

Cameron is a connector too. He is passionate about Open Science and a masterful communicator. Some of his blog posts for me are very much “I wish I’d said that…” in nature. Cameron has a way of bringing clarity to the challenges we face, offering some solutions but in a way that he is not wedded to his approach but to a solution. He is a bridge-builder and, in my opinion, single-handedly got science and Google Wave connected efficiently with the Google staff. There are many people discussing Google Wave and a number of people working with the technology but Cameron has marshaled us into action. He is a trusted evangelist for how such solutions can be applied to science and has the ear of many people, mine included. I just wish we could do more faster to support his vision!

Michael Nielsen: Thinker and theoretician on Open Science of a philosophical bent.

As with most people I have met who are involved with Open Science Michael is passionate, opinionated, thoughtful and fearless. I’ve met Michael only on two occasions, one of these where we shared the podium at the Library of Congress. His presentation was reflective in a way that it calmly called us to attention and action around Open Science. He has the ear of the publishers and some of his blog posts have the community listening, wondering, concerned and optimistic all at the same time. It depends on WHO you are in the community! As I am now in publishing this post was particularly interesting.

Andrew Lang: Supporter of all of the above and master of the nuts and bolts of the tools and technologies of Open Science.

It’s been many years since I saw the A-Team (but I hear they are making a new movie!) but if you ever saw it you’ll remember that you could lock the team in an old garden shed and with baling twine, an old lawnmower and a deck chair they’d be able to make a top notch speed racer. Andy is that character in the world of plugging together online resources to the benefit of those doing Open Science. He’s worked with JC Bradley and used Google Docs, Web Services and Open Data to publish a book on Open Solubility Data on Lulu. The paper co-authored with JC regarding Chemistry in Second Life does a great job in detailing how he is a plumber using the necessary tools to get a result. We’ve worked together with ChemSpider and the Open Spectral Data on the database to create the Spectral Game, both 1D and 2D . Andy is fast, efficient and not shy…I appreciate him asking us for things he needs…it improves our services and he gets to give away to the community for the benefit of all.

Bora Zivkovic: Organizer of the key Conference ScienceOnline (where you will give a presentation this year on ChemSpider) and influential blogger.

Bora is wonderfully influential, easy to talk to, very connected and prolific. He is very valuable to me keeping me connected to what’s going on in the world of science through his tireless communication via all of the delivery systems he uses. He is a master of the social network and a true evangelist for online science. You’ve seen how much work he has done on his blog so far to draw attention to ScienceOnline. While he is not the only one working on it he has a very loud voice, in a good way, in drawing attention to the conference. It’s been fully booked for months…and in this economy. It lends credence to the quality of the meeting as well as to how Science Online is becoming more high profile. Good!

Antony Williams (that’s you): Builder, innovator and creator of key tool of Open Science, ChemSpider. Master of building basic platforms of Open Science and standard science and adroit and effective leader of outreach to mainstream scientific societies and organizations.

Is that about right or am I way off here?

I’d define myself as an Idea Guy with a try-it-and-see mentality. I’ve worked in government labs, in academia, in Fortune 500 corporate America, in small start-up transitioned to established presence. I now work for a British publisher and have owned two of my own companies. There is a place for ideas in all places of course but the smaller the organization the more likely it is that you can run in many directions trying out various things. In our domain that only holds true if it requires sweat and intellect and not capital investments. So much was possible with ChemSpider because the platform was cheap and the investment was intellectual sweat. I still like to try out many ideas in parallel if they have low time investments. Some of the greatest pay-off projects I’ve ever been involved with come from such investigations. There are others who I judge work in a similar way and getting a lot done with minimal resources…Andy Lang, Rich Apodaca and Egon Willighagen among them.

Despite my recent roles that have been more business oriented I still think of myself as a scientist and try to keep my hand into NMR though it’s limited today to software algorithms for NMR prediction and computer assisted structure elucidation. There’s a list of my papers on Mendeley and a couple of new ones in preparation now. I am fortunate that I have remained engaged with ACD/Labs at a technical level and get to work with some of the best intellect in the world in terms of NMR prediction and structure elucidation algorithms. I believe that to improve it is best to surround myself with people I can learn from and that invigorates my grey matter!

Could you please discuss the concept of ChemSpider Everywhere and how ChemSpider is linked to from blogs and provide examples of open source applets and ChemMobi—in the latter case could you provide us a scenario of how a scientist might use ChemMobi while, say, in the audience at a talk at a scientific conference or in a chat with a graduate student during a chance encounter in the hallway of a chemistry building?

The concept behind ChemSpider Everywhere is that our web services will allow those systems and scientists needing access to ChemSpider resources will be able to get to them. I’m living a kind of “Intel Inside” mentality where structural information based on curated dictionaries connected to associated data can be fed into systems as necessary. Where is this happening already? Our web services are already integrated to mass spectrometry software from Bruker, Agilent, Waters and Thermo. There is interest in tapping ChemSpider to retrieve chemical structures associated with mass spectral data so they will fire off a file from their processing software and hit a subset of the ChemSpider database, generally a set of databases containing drug-related and metabolism information (KEGG, Drugbank, Human Metabolome Database etc). When they hit the database with a query for monoisotopic masses and narrow the search on these databases they will generally retrieve an appropriate set of hits and these are not just structures to embed into their software but links to ChemSpider with all of its rich resources.

Our intentions is that ChemSpider will be everywhere…in an appropriate manner supporting the community. We welcome more ideas of what that would look like…but are not short of our own!

What is an InChl and what is an InChl Resolver and why are they important?

An InChI is an international chemical identifier and is a way to represent a chemical structure in alphanumeric text. A very basic definition is on Wikipedia and that gives some basic figures showing how a chemical structure breaks down into a series of alphanumeric layers to describe the complexity of a chemical structure. ChemSpider was built on InChIs as a way to deduplicate structures and allow fast structure searching. InChI is becoming part of the connection network for chemistry online and I provided an overview of both internet-based chemistry and how InChIs are important to creating a structure searchable internet in a recent presentation to Drexel university students (available as a video on SciVee).

From my initial blog post we took the feedback and with the kind support of the RSC we went off and built an example of a resolver. It’s a proof of concept and what is necessary is really a federated approach where multiple resolvers can be integrated. We are presently in discussions about this with other parties and a federated resolver will be available, in proof of concept form, later this year.

Could you please discuss your work with Wikipedia and your reactions to its recent move to be less open and more reliant on expert editing? Is that a good thing or bad thing vis-à-vis ChemSpider and for society at large and for Wikipedia itself?

The best overview about starting the work was written almost two years ago now. What was initiated after a conversation with Martin Walker from the Wikipedia Chemistry team was a project whereby we would examine every chemical compound on Wikipedia, atom by atom, bond by bond, and validate the correctness of the displayed structure relative to its association with the chemical name, the CAS number, the PubChem link and other related data. What started out as a project that might take a couple of months is only now nearing completion. It has involved discussions literally down to a single stereo bond as it did with Tacrolimus.

I confess that I am only slightly aware of the situation of Wikipedia becoming less open and more controlled in its editing. On ChemSpider we have always had users, curators and master curators, proactively acknowledging skills upfront and giving more responsibilities to certain parties. This has worked pretty well for us. Wikipedia should be grateful to all contributors. Certainly the contributions of experts to validating and enhancing articles will be very important. Personally I think articles on Wikipedia are, in general, very useful when they are more than stubs.

Could you please discuss ChemSpider’s relations with PubMed and other services of the National Library of Medicine?

Our relationships to date are simply those of using PubMed services/API to access information and data to link up to ChemSpider. PubMed is truly an amazing resource and our connection last year delivered at the ACS really raised some eyebrows regarding what’s possible as a result of integrating public resources with the appropriate programming interfaces.

How is it going with the RSC? Do you have any advice for those who have created Open Science tools that start to garner interest and acquisition offers from mainstream publishers and scientific societies?

It took a while to migrate the ChemSpider platform into the RSC environment. We were moving the system from three fairly nominal servers running in a basement to an infrastructure based on virtual servers. We also moved from a “continuous beta” where we were updating code to the live environment on a regular basis to an environment where we had development servers, test servers and live servers. This migration took a while but the benefits are that we have full IT support now and are not carrying all the responsibilities for maintaining the hardware, the backups, the core software platform (SQL server, IIS etc). We also have less risk in terms of power outages and the pipes serving up ChemSpider are much thicker. The benefits to the user are obvious…better uptime and faster overall response from the site.

In terms of people who have created Open Science tools and want to garner interest in terms of acquisition my suggestion may be quite contrary. Don’t pursue the sell off as the endgame but build the appropriate solution for your users, develop a following and let your success speak for itself. I believe that’s what we did well…we created a solution of value to the community, stayed focused and on task and let the community speak on our behalf regarding the value of what we were building. Hopefully the publishers and societies are watching and will engage.

What are you most proud of vis-à-vis ChemSpider? What have been the biggest challenges since you started working on it and what has been particularly gratifying about the relationship with the RSC? What are your plans, if any, for expansion in the US?

I am most proud of the fact that we stayed true to our vision of “Building a structure centric community for chemists.” We have been upfront and honest in all of our discussions with our users and the community via the blog and on many other public forums. I believe that we have earned the respect of our users and am humbled by the number and quality of scientists who have been willing to support and work with us.

We have no immediate plans to expand in the US at present and need to balance expansion of the ChemSpider resources with overall project needs. Our team is not involved only with the delivery of ChemSpider but with a number of other projects to support cheminformatics within the organization.

What scientific conferences do you recommend that young scientists interested in Open Science attend?

You and I will both be at ScienceOnline2010 in January 2010. That would be a good one for exposing people to what’s going on with Science Online, much of it Open. Many of the major conferences in any of the sciences now have sessions regarding data sharing and Open Science..it’s just a matter of looking for the session. Certainly my experiences with the Google SciFoo camp, one I was fortunately invited to on two occasions, was one of exposure to a lot of Open Science…unfortunately it’s invitation only.

What blogs should they read? Yours for one, right?

Mine is at http://www.chemspider.com/blog/. In recent months I have stopped visiting my RSS reader as much and look for what dribbles onto Twitter from the blogs and navigate over. Ones that I visit regularly are 1) Science in the Open from Cameron Neylon, 2) Useful Chemistry from JC Bradley, 3) Michael Nielsen’s blog, 4) John Overington’s CHEMBl’og, 5) the Mendeley Blog and 6) ALL of David Bradley’s blogs. I read a lot of others also, but this is a short list.

Whom should they follow on Twitter?

I’d suggest following David Bradley, Timo Hannay, Duncan Hull, Egon Willighagen, Cameron Neylon, Rafael Sidi and Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine). What these gents have to say is specific to my mixed domain of cheminformatics and publishing so may not be of interest to chemists directly.

Should they immediately jump into the lively Life Scientists room on FriendFeed?

As with all forms of social networking tools online I would say that people need to have an interest in such an environment to begin with. Many people don’t read blogs yet, many are unaware of what RSS feeds are, Twitter would be an annoyance and FriendFeed just one more on the list. It is a very small fraction of the community that is using these tools but it is growing of course. I find FriendFeed of value to ask questions and engage a group of domain experts in discussion but the reality is that, for me, this is a tight knit community and I could engage the majority of them directly by email. I believe that Cameron Neylon and JC Bradley have had success in using FriendFeed to initiate projects and activities around funding applications. The truth is that there are so many groups to interact with and so many activities already underway for ChemSpider that I have backed away a little from all of these tools of late just because of time limitations. I’m focusing instead on building closer working relationships with a select group of people with whom I can get things done and produce an outcome or measurable output. I found that I was losing a lot of time in a week on conversations that didn’t lead anywhere. An interesting discussion was recently started here.

What are your plans for ChemSpider for the next year? For the next five?

ChemSpider was conceived in December 2006 and released to the public at the Spring ACS in Chicago in 2007. In terms of a functional system it’s less than 3 years old and having a 5 year vision would be as simple as having chemists think of ChemSpider as their first port of call to source information about “chemicals” as well as host information about chemistry. Information about chemicals will include properties, data, associated literature, suppliers, associated scientists, Open Notebook Science pages, links to information in other databases and data sources and so on. Hosting information about chemistry will include the chemical substance itself but also associated data, synthetic procedures, analytical data etc. generated within a scientist’s laboratory. If we can make this happen at a minimum then we have delivered a foundation dataset and appropriate set of web services to feed the developing semantic web for chemistry. In so doing we will have, hopefully, delivered one of the primary search engines supporting internet-based chemistry.

Finally, who are your heroes in chemistry, science generally, academia, technology and in any other aspect of life?

My heroes in chemistry are people who I believe have directly mentored me in a way that has led to an improvement in my understanding of some aspect of my work. In this list I include Gary Martin who has taught me much about NMR spectroscopy (and we have published a lot together!), Keith Preston, my PostDoc supervisor, now retired, who taught me much about how to question experimental observations and Mike Detty and Steve Godleski who I worked with at Kodak running many midnight experiments just out of interest and passion. I’m sure that none of these people will be recognizable names for your audience.

I’m also hoping to use some of my energy to raise some money for asthma as one of our sons is asthmatic. If anyone out there is connected into the asthma not for profits and can connect me up that would be great. Let’s see how it goes!

Thank you for your time, Dr. Williams.