So I’m a bit late on the post-Scifoo blogging…I’ve only just gotten back from California.

Overall, the thing that struck me the most at Scifoo was how conservative science and scientists are. I know, not a groundbreaking idea, but I think that it took an unconventional event like Scifoo to really show the contrast between the unconventional scientists at Scifoo and the rest of the scientific world.

The way scientists communicate and publish and evaluate each other’s work and the way they meet each other and connect haven’t kept up with the changes happening in the science they do and the technology they use to do it.

One result of this conservatism was seen in one of the most revealing and, frankly, depressing sessions I attended at Scifoo. Run by Alex Palazzo, a Harvard postdoc, and Andrew Walkingshaw, a postdoc at the U. of Cambridge (both inspired by a conversation they had with Eric Lander on day 1 of Scifoo), the session was called “The culture of fear: young scientists and scientific communication.”

Alex and Andrew talked about how they felt they couldn’t pursue the values of open science (rapid online publication and discussion of data, experiments, ideas, hypotheses) because they have to establish their careers in a very competitive environment: publishing in top journals, not getting scooped, getting the right credit for their work. The ‘system’ traps young scientists (biologists mostly) concerned about their careers into following the old, restrictive rules and discourages them from trying new ways of scientific communication and publication. Those who don’t like the rules and/or can’t succeed under them are driven out of academic science, a situation that Pam Silver, a systems biology professor at Harvard Medical School who was at the session, said was a “crisis” situation. And those who want to work within the system end up doing “safe science,” not high-risk, ground-breaking science.

Alex gets into more detail on the issues here and here.

The message I got from this session was that the problem arises from much bigger issues: the need for more and better ways of evaluating scholarship and assigning credit to scientists and the overemphasis of publishing in a number of top journals that’s too small relative to the amount of good science going on. I’m not really sure what can be done to solve this, short of massive cultural change across the entire scientific community. That change can begin with departments brave enough to hire people who don’t necessarily follow the rules, but who are still able to demonstrate creative thinking and excellent scholarship.

That change can also begin with things like Scifoo and new kinds of journals and websites that bend/break the rules and force people to interact and think differently.

Let’s take Scifoo.

The event (I’m not even going to call it a conference) was _so_ different in so many ways. People from an incredibly wide range of disciplines and sectors of society were thrown together: wealthy investors, celebrities, fiction writers, graphic artists, grad students, CEOs, entrepreneurs, postdocs, inventors, futurists, technologists, biologists, physicists, computer scientists (and plenty of people who do work in all 3 areas), etc etc etc. When provided with plenty of food, sugary drinks and coffee, and a fun, relaxed, noncompetitive atmosphere—not to mention the lack of fixed agenda—new ideas bloomed and new relationships formed: ideas and relationships that would never have formed in any other way. (At the closing session, people lined up at the microphone to give anecdotes about the people they met, the new collaborations forged, and new ideas that they just couldn’t wait to pursue…the giddiness was apparent.)

I think that evolving the way science is communicated and the way scientists meet each other and interact—opening it up, crossing disciplinary borders, encouraging more friendly, free-wheeling exchange—will lead to better, more innovative ideas, which will in turn lead to better science, IMHO. This was only the second year of Scifoo so it remains to be seen what kind of impact this kind of ‘unconference’ format will have on science.

But it has at least begun to change the way some scientists think and communicate. “Jonathan Eisen”:https://network.nature.com/profile/phylogenomics, an evolutionary biologist and professor at UC Davis, began “blogging”:https://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/ earnestly about a year ago, after he attended the first Scifoo. He told me that Scifoo “changed my life.” It turned him on to the values of open communication and open science.

More recently, Scifoo has even inspired people who didn’t attend. “Hari Jayaram”:https://network.nature.com/profile/UB92A80D8, a Brandeis postdoc, just “resurrected”:https://network.nature.com/blogs/user/UB92A80D8/2007/08/09/i-am-done-with-hibernating his blog on NN. Welcome back Hari!

I hope to see more scientists follow suit…not necessarily just in blogging, but in contributing to their community through open communication. (If anyone who attended Scifoo was inspired to blog and/or share their science more openly, and you’re reading this, please post a comment here!)

Scifoo I think was also a good reminder that scientists are (and should be!) more than just scientists: they are citizens with lots of great ideas who should interact with other citizens (nonscientists, scientists from fields far from their own) with lots of great ideas. Those interactions can open up the mind, get the creative juices flowing, and hopefully lower the level of conservatism among scientists that can hold back exciting progress.

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Go “here”:https://www.nature.com/scifoo/ to see what other people have been blogging about the meeting. You can read more detailed accounts of some of the sessions: “trolling through Jim Watson’s genome”:https://www.nodalpoint.org/2007/08/06/scifoo_day_3_genome_voyeurism_with_lincoln_stein, “capitalism and science; search and data mining”:https://mndoci.com/blog/2007/08/07/post-scifoo-thoughts-1/ and “science and the media.”:https://www.elementlist.com/element/blog/2007/08/live_blogging_science_foo_magi.html You can get a sense for the wide, wide range of sessions “here.”:https://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/