Some interesting sessions yesterday. First, the panel discussion on the future of scientific publishing that Sandra already described (below). I was impressed with several of the panelists, particularly Heather Joseph from a consortium of academic libraries dubbed SPARC. She made numerous valuable points. Access barriers are not the only problem users of scientific information face these days. There is also the explosion of biomedical literature, leading to colossal information overload for everyone. So SPARC encourages the development of better semantic search and indexing applications, to allow users to get a grip on what’s even out there. More polemically but in the same vein, Michael Keller from Highwire Press said that he’d be thrilled if the number of scientific publications could be reduced by half – as 50% of papers never get cited even once!

Heather Joseph also mentioned science blogs as a new medium that’s changing science communication, and she wasn’t talking about the popular ones such as The Loom or Pharyngula, but about specialized ones that serve as informal hallway discussions or minisymposia. (I’ll look into those some other time, and put a few links on the blog if I can find any.) An audience member suggested a blog-like format for readers to provide feedback on published articles. Well, that’s exactly the idea that prompted us to start Action Potential almost a year ago! It’s not working too well, though (yet??)… (A short internet walkabout reveals that the ‘audience member’ was blogging grad student Jake Young, whose take on the SfN meeting you can read here!) Michael Keller mentioned that the British Medical Journal had run an article feedback option a while ago but stopped it for lack of actual feedback. And Gary Westbrook announced that the Journal for Neuroscience has just launched eLetters for exactly the same purpose! W’ell be getting there some day; to the ongoing exchange of neuroscience ideas over the internet that is… (Annette the optimist speaking!)

Then Donald Kennedy, chief editor of Science and overall grand old man in the field, declared that he avoids blogs like the plague. Oh my! But apparently Dr. Kennedy relishes setting himself up for target practice — he also said that the Open Access movement should stop claiming the moral high ground, and that Science magazine was open access ‘for all practical purposes’. I cannot hold a candle to Dr. Kennedy, but I do respectfully disagree. Nature and Nature Neuroscience are easily available to anyone associated with a big research institution, but they are not open access by any means. Neither is Science.

I also want to mention a lady from the University of South Carolina who told the panel and audience about an undergraduate science journal she advises. I apologize for not getting her name, and I hope to walk by her poster “in the QQ section where nobody goes” some time before this meeting is over… In any case, she alerted everyone to the fact that notions such as copyright are entirely alien to the current undergrads, and that should get publishers thinking indeed. Those undergrads will be our customers, i.e. scientists, in due course.

Apart from the publishing session, I enjoyed conversations about the latest blows in the ongoing “does-kiss-and-run-exocytosis-even-exist” debate, and about the non-reproducibility of computational neuroscience papers. That one (from Yale’s Ted Carnevale) floored me completely – models are mathematics, after all! How can they not be reproducible? Carnevale explained that essential code pieces are missing from most computational papers, and that the journals should insist on having these code modules deposited in a publicly accessible database such as his ModelDB. We’ll think about it for sure. Any other computational neuroscientists want to chime in?

Cori Bargmann wins my crown for best lecture of the day, for her fine exposition of behavioral circuits in C. elegans.

And again I was disappointed in my efforts to get a half-decent dinner (shoeleather-dry hamburger at the sports bar across from the convention center…), and after spending some time at a late evening stem cell ‘data blitz’ I gave up on trying to find the MIT party as it was raining miserably. Really, Atlanta as a conference venue isn’t winning any points with me.