eScience Workshop
Having been kindly invited by Jim Gray and Alex Szalay, I spent this weekend at a Microsoft-sponsored eScience Workshop at Johns Hopkins.
I missed the first day on Friday (due to another meeting in Atlanta) but still arrived in time to hear some really excellent talks by (among others) Jim Ostell from the NCBI, Alex Szalay from Johns Hopkins, Paul Ginsparg from Cornell/arXiv.org, and Tony Hey from Microsoft. It was also good to run into some other excellent people I hadn't seen for a while, like Mark Boguski.
Above all, it was wonderful to be among so many people who truly understand how to make the most of information technology in scientific communication, and who are coming up with new ways to exploit its potential. In that sense it was completely unlike any publishing industry conference I've ever been to. (They're still 3-5 years behind the cutting edge, which is both sad and scary.)
For my own part, I gave a talk on 'The Scientific Paper of the Future'. (It covered broadly similar themes to my section in the 2020 Science report, published in March). I'm not sure how much sense they make on their own (or even with my commentary, for that matter), but FWIW here are my slides: 9.2MB PDF.
