It’s late and so I’ll keep this short. I’ll write more detailed accounts of Scifoo soon, but here are some highlights so far.

My day today started off with a contentious talk about open science. It quickly veered off into a complaint session about how the slow publication process in biology and the fear of not being credited and of being scooped are hindering open science (putting prepublication info and data online). But the physicists in the room quickly got annoyed by the complaining (not exactly new complaints either) and so the discussion got back on track to focus on current efforts to put more data and discussion of prepublication research online (such as Jean-Claude Bradley’s open notebook efforts). The session set the stage for several other related ones later in the day. It also spawned one taking place tomorrow about the culture of fear among young scientists: fear of doing open science, at the risk of jeopardizing career prospects. I’ll definitely be at that one. For another perspective on this session, check out Anna’s post on it.

I also attended sessions about the social implications of human genome sequencing/personalized genomics, building ecocities from scratch in China and a fun one about science comics for kids. More on those later.