Nature’s role in e-Science: Second Life conference LIVE

Another day with live blogging, but this time from the Scifoo lives on Second Life conference session, where we’ll talk about Nature.com‘s role in e-Science. Enjoy and join us here!

Live Coverage starts (Second Life time):

• 8:25: Everything seems to be ready! We’ll start exactly at 9:00 (or 17:00 GMT). Here is a funny welcome image with Adastar Galsworthy:

• 8:40: You may remember our first Scifoo lives on session that took place on the 20th of August. Emile Petrone talked about Knowble.net, a knowledge community for researchers to connect, communicate and collaborate. Now Emile told us they closed the site and started a new project. It’s good to be informed.
• 8:45: Joanna Scott, the owner of the Second Nature island is with us as well. More and more people are coming…

• 8:58: About a dozen attendees are here. We should start the session in some minutes. Come and join!
• 9:02: Kick-off! Matt Brown will be the first speaker and he focuses on Nature Network. He has a weird avatar:

• 9:07: I’ve always wanted to know why Nature Network is better (if it is) than WordPress or Blogger. “They’re getting about 1000 new scientists a month signing up on NN, but tens of thousands more regularly browse it.”
• 9:09: Emile Pintens: Are you looking to move into other disciplines? Outside of the life sciences? … Matt: Really, we’re trying to cover the whole of science from physics to maths to biology.
• 9:10: Richard Akerman asked a great question: say a research organisation … a research council wanted to subscribe all of it’s members – any cost? something to discuss offline?
• 9:11: The answer is they’re working on it…
• 9:14: The next speaker is Ian Mulvany from Connotea.org.

• 9:20: Connotea “is is somewhere between being an online social bookmark manager and an online social reference manager. The goal is to create a tool that allows the researcher to stay on top of the literature.”
• 9:24: Connotea is going to be integrated into Nature Network. Wow! As Emile pointed out we all have to follow the guideline 1 site to rule them all.
• 9:26: They have “a little over 60,000 people request an account, but less than that use it regularly”. What a number!
• 9:28: According to Ian Mulvany, they have something in the region of 300,000 bookmarks with citation data, and more if you roll in non citation bookmarks… + 1.2 million tags!
• 9:30: I asked him what he thinks about the recently launched 2collab. And the answer of the day is: i don’t think any one service is going to capture the market, and as a result i think it’s important for all of these services to find a way to share data and api calls, otherwise we will do a disservice to our useres
• 9:32: Here is the page for Medicine 2.0 tag on Connotea.

A panorama image of us:

• 9:36: We move on to Hilary Spencer from Nature Precedings. She talked about her project back in August, in the first sesison. Nature Precedings is a site for “Pre-publication research and preliminary findings”.
• 9:40: I remember that last time we tried to find out where is the border between review and peer-review.

• 9:46: Hilary: Nature Precedings is a place to store pieces of scientific communication in a way that allows them to be easily shared, referenced, and found by other researchers. We accept submissions in biology, medicine, chemistry and the earth sciences (except for clinical medicine).
• 9:49: They also include collaborative “web 2.0”-like features. Like commenting directly on papers; a feature called “vote to promote” (kind of like the voting on Digg); tag-based classification; RSS feeds and e-mail alerts.
• 9:53: Ricardo Vidal always has a great question: By using nature precedings does it bind the documents in any way to Nature? The answer is No, papers in Precedings receive a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
• 9:56: I just subscribed to the Genetics channel of Precedings. It’s going to be useful to follow.
• 9:58: I’m a bit surprised. They “only” have about 240 documents on the site. I thought they had many more.
• 10:03: It’s not peer-reviewed, but moderated to keep things within guidelines.
• 10:06: Helen Jaques is here on behalf of Nature Clinical Practice. Helen King couldn’t make it. She talks about Dissect Medicine.

• 10:11: 642 users in total in 2006. I asked her how Dissect Medicine is different from Biowizard.
• 10:14: Now some words about Nature Clinical Practice. As it seems to be involved in medical education, I’m curious whether they’d be interested in organizing medical educational exercises in Second Life.
• 10:23: That’s all folks! It’s been great to hear the thoughts of the guys at Nature.com. I hope we got closer to understand Nature’s role in e-Science.

See you next time! Check out the transcript at the official page.

Live Coverage Ends

Read more!

• Live Coverage: SciFoo lives on session about videos in science
• Live Coverage Now: SciFoo lives on session about the definition of Open Science
• SciFoo lives on in Second Life: Web 2.0 and Medicine
• SciFoo lives on: in Second Life
• Live Blogging Today: First Medical Simulation in Second Life!