Science in the 21st Century - 2008

At a time when the great challenges facing our civilization are scientific in nature (climate change, sustainable energy, pandemic disease), improving the voting public\'s understanding and appreciation of science is more important than ever. I will argue that the Internet in general and weblogs…

In the 1990s, the eprint arXivs fundamentally reshaped scientific communication in Math and Physics. In this decade, blogs, wikis and other, similar, tools are mediating an equally profound reshaping of scientific communication. I will talk about my own experience, as a blogger, software designer…

This talk will review the public impact of developments in open access to research on education, professional practice, and public policy, with consideration given to legal, economic, and academic freedom issues, as well as to the very design of scholarly communication systems. The Public Knowledge…

The shift from print to online has already created a revolution in scientific communication, but it is far from complete. Among other effects, it has brought huge opportunities and threats to incumbent publishers. This talk will discuss the imperative for publishers to keep moving forward if they…

True open access to scientific publications not only gives readers the possibility to read articles without paying subscription, but also makes the material available for automated ingestion and harvesting by 3rd parties. Once articles and associated data become universally treatable as computable…

Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind\'s explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by unknown monsters. Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces, see scimaps.org, aim to serve today\'s explorers understanding and…

The rapid technological change around us supports the idea of general speedup in the tempo of life, the illusion that we are living \'on Internet time.\' Yet many changes are still taking generations, and that includes changes in scientific communication as well as in sociology of science. The…

\'The Medium Is The Message ... The Audience Is The Content\', Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. A \'wiki is a ... collaborative space ... because of its total freedom, ease of access, and use, [and] simple and uniform navigational conventions…

A wiki is an excellent tool for organizing and representing human knowledge. By building a personal wiki notebook, a scientific researcher may optimally organize past and current research notes. In this brief practical introduction I will provide a guided tour of an open scientific notebook --…

Mendeley is a new \'science 2.0\' tool for managing & sharing academic papers. Its co-founder, Victor Henning, will highlight conceptual similarities between Last.fm and Mendeley to explore whether the ideas behind social music services can be applied to social software for researchers.

I introduce `The Periodic Table of Expertises\' (Collins and Evans 2007). The classification is driven by the idea of tacit knowledge. Its most important division is between the expertise of those who have acquired tacit knowledge pertaining to a specialism as a result of social interaction with the…