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Over on Nature Network, we've recently started an online journal club in the Neuroscience group. It has more than 100 members and it's one of the fastest growing groups on the site. Neuroscientists are talking about the latest research and trends in the field in the group's forum. If you dig neuroscience, please join the group and join in the discussions.
We have added OpenID support to logins for Connotea. You can try it out here: http://www.connotea.org/openid. If you have any feedback about this you can leave it on the Conotea blog Conotea blog hosted on Nature Network.
At the moment this is probably only useful for the more geeky end of the spectrum, it's pretty well accepted that managing log-in details for dozens of web sites can become a pain in the ass. I have to admit that it took me a while to 'get' OpenID, The basic idea is that you refer any site that supports the OpenID protocol to another site that you trust and where you manage your OpenID. This should allow you to manage your log in details to many sites from just one site, hence reducing the complexity of existing on the web. Of course you need to really really trust the place that is managing your OpenID, and you need to have every site on the web support OpenID, or else you end up with a Balkanisation of identity management systems.
OpenID has been burrowing it's way through the alpha-geek community for about a year now and some pretty big companies have gotten involved with support for it. This has really picked up momentum since the creation of the OpenID foundation with Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board.
In principle the situation should be easy. Pick one OpenID and one provider and use this to log in everywhere. Our addition of OpenID support goes a little way towards that utopian dream, but in reality things are probably going to take a little longer to be that simple.
For instance, yahoo will allow you to use your yahoo id as an OpenID, but at the moment you can't assign an OpenID from another OpenID provider as a login that Yahoo will accept. Google is allowing commenting on Blogger blogs from any OpenID accounts, but the biggie would be if I could assign any OpenID that I liked to my google account, imagine that!
There is one very very nice aspect of OpenID, and it was after playing with this that I really 'got' it. This is OpenID delegation. This is where you can pick a web page to be your OpenID and delegate the handling of all of the OpenID machinery to an OpenID provider.
If you look at the head section of the HTML of my web page http://www.mulvany.net you will see the following lines:
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://ianmulvany.myopenid.com/" />
This means that http://www.mulvany.net is now my OpenID and myopenid.com is taking care of all the work for me. If at some point in the future I don't like myopenid.com, or they disappear, then I can change the link in the head of my web page and continue as normal.
I think that's cool. I can now use this to log in to my Connotea account. Now I just can't wait to be able to use it to log in to my google or yahoo account!
We published an editorial at the beginning of this month in Nature Physics. I wanted to repost it here and find out if anyone out there might have any feedback for us on this.
doi:10.1038/nphys841
Abstract
We want to hear from physicists what kind of tools would help in managing the ever-growing tide of information from, and the exciting possibilities of, the internet.
Introduction
At the landmark Solvay conference of 1911, a group of prominent physicists gathered to discuss the emerging ideas of the day — ideas that would eventually come to underpin the development of quantum mechanics. Just as it was then, participation at conferences is vital for the progress of science. But some things change. At the start of the last century, attending a conference was necessary to find out what was going on; now that information is at our fingertips. Whereas in 1911 communication between scientists was slow and relatively data-poor, we now live in an environment in which there is an over-abundance of information.
In the twenty-first century, often what we take away from conferences is not so much the big headline discoveries but rather the benefit of face-to-face networking with friends and peers. It's those serendipitous conversations in the coffee breaks that we recall later. Conferences are also a sometimes welcome escape from the office and from the unending flow of e-mail. Scientific communication has changed: the internet offers instantaneous and distributed delivery of information, bringing more to our desktops than to the desks of 1911.
When such a wealth of information abounds, how best to filter it? Traditionally the peer-reviewed journal has been the principal indicator in deciding what it's worth spending time to read, but when did you last read a journal (even this one!) from cover to cover? On the arXiv new-article page, while browsing do you keep your eye open for keywords, or individuals or groups you know, or your own supervisor's name? How about jumping from cond-mat to hep-th, or vice versa, in case there is something interesting over on that page? And if you still have time left, which of the growing number of physics blogs should you be reading?
This growth in choice has driven each of us to develop personal search strategies. Yet a recommendation from someone you know will often have greater impact — positive or negative — on what you decide to read. This is true when the recommendation comes from someone we are close to, but does it scale? The anthropologist Robert Dunbar has proposed that 150 is the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships", and this would seem to have some validity. Scientific communities are already growing to this scale, in terms of professional relationships alone. Tools to manage both the flow of information and the social relationships are needed.
Nature Publishing Group is developing such tools for scientists, to help them communicate, share and organize information relevant to their work. Moreover, recognizing that it is people who generate all of the world's science, these will be first and foremost social applications. Among the tools already available, forums for identified individuals on Nature Network (http://network.nature.com) offer somewhere to engage in a professional discussion with your colleagues and start new forums in your area; Connotea (www.connotea.org) enables collaborative tagging and sharing of references; and Scintilla (http://scintilla.nature.com) is a tool for finding and sharing news items and blog posts. These are unabashedly Web2.0 tools — 'Web2.0' being one of the most pervasive memes of the past few years, referring to the development of a more data-centred concept for the internet.
Each item that is contributed to the web — be it an article, blog post, bookmark or dataset — comes with its own trail of influences, through the vectors that connect it to other content, such as citations or hyperlinks. Web publishing is, therefore, data-rich. If the tools created to interact with these data are both social and intuitive, they become a means of tracking friends and those whose advice you trust; by building in such intelligence, this new web may have as much potential for serendipity as those coffee-break conversations.
Our efforts in creating suitable tools are driven by the needs of scientists, and we want these tools to work well for physicists. So tell us what you need and how we should develop them. We have tools to track conversations, blog posts and references — what other units of communication for physicists could be aided by tools like these? Are there changes to the tools themselves that would make them more useful to you? We need to hear what you need. Tell us at e-mail: naturephysics@nature.com.
Very often, figuring out how to use an online database means battling it out with the user interface mano e mano, trying the help manual or (best of all) finding somebody who knows it all already.
Even the most user friendly online tools can be tricky and off-putting for many lab works. Open Helix is one company who see commercial value in providing tutorials, and it's not an insubstantial market (they recently got $1M to develop tutorials for the NIH, for example). Some of the tutorials are even free, having been paid for by the databases owners.
Open Helix have recently started a blog which has regular features including "Tip of the Week" and "What's Your problem?" Given how much trouble lab researchers can have with online resources, blogs like this are worth watching.
In the next event in the series, George Monbiot, British environmentalist, journalist and author is coming to give a talk on Second Nature on Thursday. For those of you that don't know him, George is the author of Heat: How we can stop the planet burning and his talk will cover all his ideas about what needs to be done, including a 90% reduction in carbon emissions, if we're to avoid reaching the tipping point.
Date: Thursday 21st February
Time: 9am SLT, Midday EST, 5pm GMT
Location: Second Nature Island
Full details at Nature Network - all welcome!
Want to see what this Second Life business is all about? Save a large, unfeasibly cute marine mammal? Both?
The first event on Second Nature of 2008 is taking place this Monday, 18th February, 9am PST/5pm GMT. All welcome to join us with CeAire and Hawc Decosta who will talk all about their work in Florida with the endangered manatee: what it is, what put it on the endangered list to begin with and what's being done to save it.
Full details and help for SL beginners over at Nature Network
What do UK researchers want from UKPMC, their free archive of full-text journal articles? That was the subject of a meeting today at the Wellcome Trust in London. Launched a year ago, UKPMC has become established as a part of the national research infrastructure but as with all online projects the scope for enhancement is ever present.
Proceedings were kicked off by introductory talks from three luminaries – Biomed Central’s publisher Matt Cockerill talked about the state of commercial Open Access publishing; our own Timo Hannay talked about Web 2.0; and Deitrich Rebholz-Schuhmann (EBI) and Sophia Ananiadou (U Manchester) talked about text mining and semantic enrichment of scientific literature. Their presentation slides will be going online at UKPMC soon, I gather, and are worth a look.
Discussion groups then pondered the question about priorities for further UKPMC development. Three broad areas were put forward to focus us all: adding in Web 2.0 community participation, adding in new content types, and adding in new user services. Discussions were lively and good natured -- it was put to me that Nature could delete practically its entire back catalogue of supplementary data files and nobody would notice. (I took it as only partly a joke.)
Lots of ideas were put up. "Add information about grants (awarded or available)". "Provide machine-generated summaries of the facts contained in articles" (in case you don't trust the authors' abstracts). "If it's linkable, link it". One idea that seemed to get universal support was providing citation analysis (such as citation rates; forward citation linking).
I could give you more of a synopsis of the ideas and how they went down, but that would spoil the fun: the organizers want others to slip in their thoughts via a short online survey form, and a summary report will be put up on the UKPMC website in due course.
I have only one complaint – that my meeting badge wasn’t enough to get me in to see the 7 storey high “molten metal” sculpture in the sister building next door. Maybe next time.
There's a great discussion going on at Nature Network about the opportunities and risks of brain-enhancing drugs. And Nick Bostrom from the University of Oxford has a great “PODium” opinion piece in the latest Nature Podcast (audio|transcript). Do listen to the whole show, but if you're in a hurry to hear Nick's bit then skip to 19’30”.
These follow an excellent commentary and subsequent correspondence on the topic in Nature.
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