OpenWetWare talk:PLoS community page

Austin Che and Reshma Shetty are writing a community page on OpenWetWare for PLoS Biology. Please leave feedback here.

Outstanding issues

1. Do we need to talk about the figure more?

Feedback, comments and suggestions

• Jason R. Kelly 09:06, 6 September 2007 (EDT): Minor point, but I don't think the google results stuff (listing specific terms) is worth mentioning.

• Ricardo Vidal 16:05, 4 September 2007 (EDT): Please correct me if I'm wrong. This new community page will harbor "inside" information/details regarding the activities that PLoS (biology) has planned to help disseminate scientific research? If so, why is all the OWW information exposed on this page when it already exists on other pages like here and here?
  • Reshma 16:43, 4 September 2007 (EDT): A PLoS community page is actually a type of article published in PLoS Biology. As seen on their site, a Community Page is "a forum for organizations and societies to highlight their efforts to enhance the dissemination and value of scientific knowledge". We're writing a draft of an article on OpenWetWare to be submitted as a community page to PLoS Biology. Since the topic of the article is OpenWetWare, we're drawing on existing pages on the site for source material. Sorry for the confusing page name!
    • Ricardo Vidal 16:53, 4 September 2007 (EDT): Thank you for the explanation, I was unaware of such community pages. I believe that the newly created OWW blogs are an important point to include too as they deliver a closer look at the user's experiences and research thoughts/findings providing even more transparency to the scientific community.
      • Reshma 22:36, 7 September 2007 (EDT): I agree that blogs are very useful. But to date, I am not sure that OpenWetWare has brought anything unique to blogging. I'd imagine that a lot of people have written about scientific blogging so perhaps the article should focus on those aspects of OWW that haven't been talked about as much elsewhere?

• Julius B. Lucks 21:24, 4 October 2007 (EDT): In the subsection Information sharing in research is slow and limited, there is a sentence that says 'The lag time from final experimental result to appearance online of the finished publication can easily be months or years.' I think this sentence should be clarified to say something about a peer review process. Perhaps 'The lag time from final experimental result to appearance online in a peer-reviewed publication of the finished publication can easily be months or years.' As is, the sentence is not true as exemplified by the practicaly instantaneous turnaround time for posting a paper on arXiv.org for example.

• Julius B. Lucks 21:31, 4 October 2007 (EDT): I would suggest changing the order of subtopics in the OpeWetWare's Solution section. Lab web pages is not as strong as protocols and lab notebooks. I prefer having the order Protocols, Lab Notebooks, Lab Webpages (then the rest the same). This way we address in order technical science, e-science, and practical information management in that order.

Wikipedia

oww: prepublication; wikipedia: postpublication

should we really talk about wikipedia? I wonder if we should just ignore wikipedia? If we do want to talk about it, I propose moving this to a later section.

• Ricardo Vidal 05:35, 6 September 2007 (EDT): I think that wikipedia should be ignored. Recently there was a bit of talk about wikipedia and how it sucks for science. Read more at Why Does Wikipedia Suck on Science? (this post was featured at Slashdot and Digg, so it got some exposure)

oww: editors are scientists with some knowledge of field, each account associated with real person (accounts screened by real person), usernames are full names; wikipedia: anonymous editors, can't really know when you should trust a specific article

also, do we want to discuss authorship in the context of wikipedia ... why not just talk about our author policy in a later section

Community page guidelines

The "Community Page" is meant to provide organizations interested in the dissemination of scientific information with an opportunity to highlight their activities. We ask contributors to resist the temptation of self-promotion and instead focus on conveying information to a diverse audience. It is usually preferable to focus on a specific activity or program rather than listing a number of them. Length guidelines: Approximately one page, which accommodates approximately 900 words and one image.

Published community pages

Not a complete list

1. Leveraging the Knowledge of Our Peers: Online Communities Hold the Promise to Enhance Scientific Research
2. CAMERA: A Community Resource for Metagenomics
3. Linking Biodiversity Conservation and Livelihoods in India
4. Peer Review—The Newcomers' Perspective