SCI Journals & Science Conference

INTO THE FUTURE
Improving science communication requires a greater understanding of how human communities are organized to transmit information

Richard Gayle

The Scientific Revolution was kick-started 400 years ago when the principles of openness and transparency moved us away from alchemy. Our abilities to disseminate scientific results further and faster have almost exactly paralleled the accelerating course of our scientific endeavors. But now we are generating data and information at an exponential rate. Important facts are simply not being dispersed effectively. We need to leverage something that is uniquely human — our very deep social networks. Human social networks look almost exactly the same as the networks of computers that form the Internet. Both networks are very efficient at moving around large amounts of information rapidly. We know how to construct a computer network so it scales properly and can deal with exponentially increasing information flow. Now we have to learn how to do the same thing with our own social networks. Modern tools allow us to visualize human networks, leveraging their effectiveness for moving information. Openness, transparency and inclusiveness will continue to be important aspects for processes to enhance the spread of knowledge. New processes for enhancing rapid and bulk amounts of information promulgation in widespread social settings will be critical for solving the complex problems facing us.

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• YouTube (recreation)

Richard Gayle formed SpreadingScience to empower scientific communities that are trying to enhance their information flow, allowing the dissemination of innovation to be increased. As a Senior Staff Researcher at a premier biotechnology company (Immunex Corporation) he saw firsthand the effectiveness of a fast and lean organization possessing potent social networks. As Vice President of Research at a biotechnology startup (Etubics Corporation) he used these principles to translate the company’s technology platform from an academic lab into human clinical trials with no more than three research employees, including himself. He continues as a Director on the Board. He created and managed the intranets at these two companies, gaining direct experience of the effectiveness of informational and social networking tools on scientific innovation. He worked on business development with the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association. He collaborated with the Washington Global Health Alliance on several convening events as well as with the Global Health Nexus project. He is a Founder of the Sustainable Path Foundation – using scientific understanding and systems thinking to promote and health in our region – where he remains on the Board. He is currently working on creating a Public Academy of Science.

REACHING THE PUBLIC
Taking science directly to the public through books, op-eds, and public appearances

Leah Ceccarelli

Scholarship on the rhetoric of science applies concepts developed in the humanities to the persuasive efforts of scientists. In this talk, I will introduce some rhetorical scholarship on the communication of scientists who speak directly to the public in the form of popular books, essays, and speeches. Relating the take-home message from a number of case studies, I will offer advice about what scientists should and should not do when engaging the public directly about their research. The case studies that I will discuss as negative examples include the use of hedges in the Wakefield autism controversy, the unfortunate use of hyperbole in the Ida controversy, and the counterproductive use of the frontier of science metaphor by E. O. Wilson in his arguments for biodiversity research and by Francis Collins in his promotion of genomics research. Case studies that I will offer up as exemplary include the use of litotes by climate scientists to manage critique of their work in the wake of a scientifically inaccurate but emotionally charged science fiction movie, and burden of proof and stasis shifts used by climate scientists to effectively counter the public manufacture of scientific controversy by climate skeptics.

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Leah Ceccarelli (PhD Northwestern University) is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a rhetorical critic and theorist whose research focuses on public discourse about science. She has received several awards for her research, including the Rhetoric Society of America’s Book Award (for Shaping Science with Rhetoric) and the American Forensics Association’s Outstanding Research Award (for “Manufactured Scientific Controversy: Science, Rhetoric and Public Debate”). Her most recent book is On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation (Michigan State University Press, 2013). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American Public Address, Public Debate, Rhetorical Criticism, Classical Rhetoric, and Rhetoric of Science. At the University of Washington, she helps coordinate the Science Studies Network and serves on the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate. She is on the editorial boards of Rhetoric & Public Affairs and Philosophy & Rhetoric, is Vice Chair-Elect of the Public Address Division of the National Communication Association, serves on the Publications Committee of the Western States Communication Association, and is Co-Editor of the new book series, Transdisciplinary Rhetoric, sponsored by the Rhetoric Society of America and Penn State University Press.

REINVENTING JOURNAL IMPACT
Are impact factors measuring the right things, and how can we do better?

Jevin West

Science is a massively parallel human endeavor to explain and predict the nature of the physical world. In science, knowledge is acquired cumulatively and collaboratively — and the principal mode for sharing this knowledge is the institution of scholarly publishing. In science, ideas are built upon ideas, models upon models, verifications upon prior verifications. This cumulative process of construction leaves behind it a latticework of citations, from which we can reconstruct the geography of scientific thought and retrace the paths along which intellectual activity has proceeded. Eigenfactor.org® is an academic research project co-founded by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom and sponsored by the Bergstrom Lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. We aim to use recent advances in network analysis and information theory to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. We are committed to broadly disseminating our research findings and technological developments, while respecting the confidentiality of the data sources we use. Several aspects of the Eigenfactor Project can be found at Eigenfactor.org (beta version).

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Jevin is a theoretical biologist, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Information School and co-inventor of the eigenfactor, the industry and library-standard system for measuring journal influence. He is also an internationally-recognized expert in big data. Prior to joining the iSchool, he worked as a big data researcher at the UW’s Center for Commercialization and at IceLab in Sweden.

OPEN ACCESS
What is OA? How prevalent is it and how is it expected to grow?

Michael Boock

This presentation provides a brief definition of open access, describes where we are at now in terms of open access prevalence and where we might expect to be in the near future. The author differentiates between gold and green open access, describes the growth or diminution of those two forms of OA around the world, provides examples of each form, and describes existing and emerging gold open access funding models. The author also touches on the emergence of federal, state and institutional open access policies with a focus on institutional policies, what they entail and their potential impact. Potential implementation scenarios for the White House Office of Science and Technology open access policy memorandum and the FASTR legislation are also reviewed.

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Michael Boock, associate professor and head of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services at Oregon State University Libraries & Press, has over 17 years experience building a variety of digital library services, particularly in the areas of digital repositories and digital collections. Over the last three years, as Head of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services at Oregon State University, he has been at the forefront of growing and creating new and emerging services that support the visibility, management and preservation of the university’s scholarly output. He was a key member of the faculty group that advocated for and developed OSU’s open access policy in June 2013. Boock has authored articles about organizational models for transitioning library technical services units to digital library services and several articles about digital access, digital library workflows and open access. The Center for Digital Scholarship at Oregon State University Libraries & Press supports the visibility, management and preservation of the research and scholarship conducted by the university. Services include open access journal and conference proceedings publishing, open access repository services, open access policy promotion and implementation, data management, digital collection creation and copyright support.

OPEN DATA
What are the practical and ethical challenges of
creating a more open data environment?

Claudia Emerson

The momentum of the Open Access movement over the last two decades has played a significant role in increasing access to the results of health research, visible in commitments to sharing in large-scale international initiatives (e.g. the Human Genome Project), and the proliferation of open access journals. However, despite repeated calls for ‘open data’ from various stakeholders, and requirements from research funders and open access publishers to make datasets available to the broader research community, the sharing of health data remains a challenge. In part, this is attributable to both practical and ethical challenges. On the practical side, there may be lack of resources, capacity and infrastructure to curate and store data to enable access, a challenge which is magnified in low and middle income settings. On the normative side, there may be concerns about the privacy of data subjects, the loss of data ownership and control, worries about the misuse or misrepresentation of data, and background conditions of distrust related to historical inequities in data sharing. This presentation will examine some of these challenges, and propose ethical principles that can serve as a starting point for improving an open data environment.

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Dr. Claudia Emerson is Senior Scientist at the Sandra Rotman Centre, University Health Network & University of Toronto, and is appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, Canada. Claudia specializes in ethics and policy of research involving human subjects. She is core investigator on the Ethical, Social, and Cultural (ESC) Program for Global Health funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2006, where she provides ethics consultation across the various programs at the Foundation. Within the ESC program, Claudia leads the Data Access research portfolio with a focus on developing governance models to facilitate data sharing in global health, and led the development of the Gates Foundation Data Access policy. Recent projects include overcoming barriers to polio data access to enable modeling of risk and strategies to complete eradication. Claudia serves in several advisory capacities related to public health activities, including the National Ethics Committee for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Longitudinal Study on Aging, and the International Taskforce for the Eradication Investment Cases of Onchocerciasis, Lymphatic Filariasis, and Human African Trypanosomiasis. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Council of Science (ICSU) World Data System. Claudia holds a B.Sc. in Biochemistry and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy, specializing in Bioethics.

RESEARCH COLLABORATION NETWORKS

How Sage Bionetworks is redefining biomedical research through
open systems, incentives and norms

Stephen Friend

At Sage Bionetworks, we work to redefine how complex biological data is gathered, shared and used. We challenge the traditional roles of individuals and groups, patients and researchers. Our work includes the building of platforms and services and undertaking research developing predictors relating to health. Arising in 2009 from a donation by Rosetta Inpharmatics (Merck Inc), we are a non-profit research organization based in Seattle, US and collaborate with a worldwide network. We create technology platforms that facilitate collaboration on data, governance platforms that enable data sharing and reuse, run challenges to solve complex biomedical problems, and perform our own cutting-edge computational biology and research.

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Dr. Friend is the president, co-founder and director of Sage Bionetworks. He has also served as a senior vice-president at Merck, co-founded Rosetta Inpharmatics with Lee Hartwell and Leroy Hood, and held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital. In June of this year, the White House honored Dr. Friend as one of thirteen Champions of Change who are promoting and using open scientific data and publications to accelerate progress and improve our world.

CITIZEN SCIENCE
The promise and early lessons of experience from UBiome

Jessica Richman

Citizen science is scientific research conducted by nonprofessional scientists, often by crowdsourcing. Traditionally, citizen scientists contributed to scientific endeavors by collecting and analyzing data. uBiome takes citizen science to the next level by providing access to cutting edge research tools that directly address the latest questions in biomedical research. In addition, citizen science projects encourage engagement in scientific research and public understanding of science.

• Unfortunately, Jessica was unable to attend

Jessica Richman is the founder and CEO of uBiome. As the leader of the largest successful citizen science initiative in history, Richman is encountering not only the boundaries of citizen science, but the perils as well, including working through the issues of how citizen science will maintain scientific rigor and patient protections.

DINNER ADDRESS 1: THE LIMITS TO RAPID CHANGE
Where will the road to change take us?

Maryann Martone

1. The promise of new modes of communication rests on the duality of modern scholarship: need for both human understanding and machine-actionability. Those who think about human requirements don’t always understand machine requirements; those who understand machine requirements, don’t always understand human requirements
2. Barriers to change: culture of science is conservative and based on micro-communitites. As long as we can communicate with our peers, we are rewarded and see no impetus to change. Reputation is everything; exposing things openly may challenge reputation
3. Barriers to change: the reward system in science stifles innovation in publishing; journal submission systems stifle innovation
4. Data: We’ve never had to deal with it before; it was always viewed as disposable. Many issues about data and other potentially reusable scholarly artifacts. What is necessary to make them re-usable? Neither publishers or researchers quite know what to do with data and neither are willing or able to foot the bill.

• Unfortunately, Maryann was unable to attend

Maryann Martone received her BA from Wellesley College in biological psychology and Ancient Greek, and her Ph. D. in neuroscience in 1990 from the University of California, San Diego, where she is currently a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience. An anatomist by training, she now focuses on ways to make neuroscience data sharable and re-usable. She is the-principal investigator of the Neuroinformatics Framework project, a national project to establish a uniform resource description framework for neuroscience. Her recent work has focused on building ontologies for neuroscience for data integration. She just completed her tenure as the US scientific representative to the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), where she still heads to program on ontologies. Dr. Martone recently joined FORCE11, an organization dedicated to advancing scholarly communication and e-scholarship, as Executive Director. She is also Co-Editor in Chief of Brain and Behavior, an open-access journal published by Wiley.

DINNER ADDRESS 2: A WEB OF CHALLENGES
Keeping the litter out of the literature:
Improving the quality of scientific communication

Tom Lang

Science, to be science, must be recorded and documented by researchers; evaluated and reproduced by their peers; be made systematic and cumulative through archiving and indexing; and then be made easily and widely accessible worldwide through publications and conferences. Problems anywhere in this sequence can affect the quality of the literature and therefore the decisions that it supports. In particular, authors are not necessarily trained in how to conduct, describe, document, publish, or evaluate research and so are often unaware of important sources of error, confounding, and bias. Peer review, despite being the mainstay of scientific publishing, remains fraught with problems: peer reviewers don’t know any more than do authors. Several standards organizations are working to improve the quality of scientific communication from within the community, but contributions from observers outside the community with a different perspective may have a needed and substantial impact.

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Tom Lang, MA, is an international consultant and educator in medical writing and scientific publications. A former Manager of Medical Editing Services at the Cleveland Clinic, he has also taught on the University of Chicago’s Medical Writing Program since its inception in 1999. His first book, How to Report Statistics in Medicine, is a standard reference in evidenced-based medicine and medical writing. His second, How to Write, Publish, and Present in the Health Sciences, was selected by the Society for Technical Communication as “One of the top 100 books on technical writing, 1991-2010.” He received the 1994 Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Workshop Leader from the American Medical Writers Association, the 2002 Excellence in Continuing Education Award from the American Statistical Association, and the First Excellence in Teaching Award from the Graham School of General Studies, University of Chicago, in 2005. He is a Past President of the Council of Science Editors, the current Treasurer of the World Association of Medical Editors, a Fellow of the American Medical Writers Association, and the recipient of the Association’s 2002 Harold Swanberg Distinguished Service Award for outstanding contributions to medical communications, and the 2011 Eric Martin Award for excellence in medical writing. His master’s degree is in Communications management, from the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California.