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Editors’ Conference Agenda – 2011

Here is a preliminary list of conferences that the Molecular Systems Biology editors will be attending in 2011. We are looking forward seeing a lot of the Alps this year, with meetings in Innsbruck, Geneva, and Vienna. And, of course, we also looking forward to meeting Molecular Systems Biology’s readers and authors; if you are attending one of these conferences or workshops, we would be quite happy to chat with you and learn about your research.  Read more

Editors’ conference agenda

I spent May 14-15th at the Symposium on Integrative Network Biology and Cancer, hosted by the Institute of Cancer Research in London. The organizers, Chris Bakal and Rune Linding, managed to attract a stellar speakers list, and I had great discussions with many of the attendees. Inspired by this, I thought it could be useful to share a tentative list of conferences in 2010 that will be attended by the Molecular Systems Biology editors. If you happen to be at one these conferences, we would be delighted to meet you in person and hear about your research.  Read more

The end of news, the end of reason

Guest post by Holger Breithaupt, Science & Society Editor, EMBO reports, Heidelberg Aside from what Waldorf & Statler make of the internet, it is the greatest source of information humanity has ever created; larger than the Vatican Archives, the Library of Congress and all public and university libraries combined. And it’s fast. I don’t have to wait for the news on TV or the daily newspaper to tell me about the US government’s latest reaction to AIG’s bonus payments: the internet, in particular the blogosphere or that latest spawn of it, twittering, gives me real-time news, 24 hours a day.  Read more

SciFoo: scientific fireworks

SciFoo: scientific fireworks

In his list of eight ‘generative’ values (Better Than Free), Kevin Kelly includes ’embodiment’–the actual physical realization of an item or event which could be otherwise freely distributed over the web. While we are all ‘hyperlinked’ on the Internet, the value of those unique qualities that cannot be generated or “copied” on the web is dramatically increased. The type of intense emulation and shared excitement sparked at the recent Science Foo Camp (SciFoo 2008), organized by Nature, Google and O’Reilly, gave a wonderful example of the unique value of direct human exchange during an exclusive event bringing together roughly 200 top scientists, ‘geeks’ and other technologists at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.  Read more

Soon Sci Foo!

A last very quick post before going on vacation (Swiss Alps…). In two weeks I will have the great privilege to attend the mythic SciFoo ‘un-conference’ at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Many ideas of exciting sessions are already circulating. I would just like to add my support to Cameron Neylon’s proposal for a discussion around the issue of building a ‘Science Data Commons’. The availability and ‘integrability’ of scientific data represent probably some of the major challenges in scientific communication and, obviously, I would be excited to see if, from the discussions at Sci Foo, some ideas will emerge on how scientific journals can take concrete and pragmatic steps to help making scientific data readily available in a useful form.  Read more

ISMB 2008: micro-blogging at its best

Probably like many others, I have often been puzzled by the phenomenon of ‘micro-blogging’, which consists in posting very short messages on the web (typically via sites such as Twitter) with the goal of providing an instantaneous description of the activity, state of mind or thoughts of the writer. The last few days, a small group of bloggers attending the ISMB 2008 Conference in Toronto used a form of collective micro-blogging on FriendFeed in an intensive way to cover many of the talks held at the conference.  Read more

The impact of online publishing

“I haven’t browsed a table of content in ages; I find all my papers by Pubmed searches anyway”. We have probably all heard this remark, which reflects a general trend as how online publishing has changed the way we retrieve scientific publications. In a study published today in Science, Evans (“Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship”, Evans, 2008) presents data on citations patterns showing that the appearance of electronic publications has been accompanied by a decrease in the number of citations and a progressive restriction of citations to recent papers:  … Read more