Publishing and eScience Panel

Scientific Publishing in a Connected, Mobile World
Speaker: Mark Abbott
New tools for content development and new distribution channels create opportunities for the scientific community, opening new venues for collaboration, review, and self-publication. However, publishing is at the heart of the culture of science, and several centuries of experience with publishing in journals will not simply vanish. Issues of peer review, reproducibility, integrity, and scientific context will need to be addressed before these new tools take hold. Open access is but one part of this conversation.

How to Collaborate with the Crowd: a Method for “Publishing” Ongoing Work

Speaker:
Jeff Dozier
The typical model for interdisciplinary research starts with a small-group partnership, typically with colleagues who have known each other for a while. They learn to articulate problems across disciplinary boundaries and discover shared interests. They successfully seek funding, and work together for several years. This model works, but can be cumbersome. An alternative model is to express a sequence of processes and data that integrate to create a suite of data products, and to identify insertion points where expertise from another perspective might be able to contribute to a better solution.

When Provenance Gets Real: Implications of Ubiquitous Provenance for Scientific Collaboration and Publishing

Speaker:
James Frew
We expect (or hope?) that the impending standardization of data models, ontologies, and services for information provenance will make scientific collaboration easier and scientific publishing more transparent. We propose a panel of active producers and users of provenance who will address scenarios such as:

  • “I’m a scientist, and this is what I would really like to tell someone with provenance.”
  • “I’m a scientist, and this is what I wish provenance would tell me when I use your data, join your project, or …”
  • “I build systems that capture and/or manage provenance, and this is what I’ve seen scientists actually do when they create and/or use provenance.”

Data Journal Challenge for the Fourth Paradigm-Trust through Data on Environmental Studies and Projects
Speaker: Shuichi Iwata, The Graduate School of Project Design
Landscapes on recent big data issues to bridge environmental studies and social expectations are reviewed to design an e-Journal with data files and models. Data parts are keys to give semantics to original scientific papers, and also double keys for computational models. Structured data with explicit descriptions about their metadata can be managed and their traceability can be realized systematically, step by step. However, almost all available data are unstructured, fragmented, and contain ambiguities and uncertainties. Balances between data quality and freshness/costs/coverage are discussed so as to draw a road map for a data journal, referring to two preliminary case studies on materials data and data due to nuclear reactor accidents and problems.

Speaker Details

Mark R. Abbott is dean and professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. in conservation of natural resources from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974 and his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis, in 1978. He has been at OSU since 1988 and has been dean of the college since 2001. Dr. Abbott’s research focuses on the interaction of biological and physical processes in the upper ocean and relies on both remote sensing and field observations. Dr. Abbott is a pioneer in the use of satellite ocean color data to study coupled physical/biological processes. He has also advised the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation on ocean information infrastructure.

Jeff Dozier, Visiting Researcher from University of California, Santa Barbara. I study snow, at scales that range from sintering between two small grains to estimating snowmelt runoff over whole mountain ranges. I’ve been at UCSB since the fall of 1974, so Santa Barbara has been a good place to think about snow and ice. My work at MSR addresses ways that we might combine satellite images and land-surface models to forecast snowmelt runoff in big mountain ranges worldwide, specifically in this case the Hindu Kush – a mountain range with meager infrastructure, sparse gauging, challenges of accessibility, emerging or enduring water-related insecurity, and substantial US investments in water management.

At UCSB, I served from 1994-2000 as the founding dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and I teach courses in Earth System Science, the Mountain Snowpack, Remote Sensing, Environmental Modeling, and occasional seminars on topics like Climate Science and Economics. I used to be a serious rock climber and alpinist, with a dozen or so first ascents in the Hindu Kush and, in Tuolumne Meadows, a popular climbing feature named Dozier Dome. Now most of my mountain adventures involve skiing.

Date:
Speakers:
James Frew, Jeff Dozier, Mark Abbott, and Shuichi Iwata
Affiliation:
Oregon State, Microsoft Research, University of California, The University of Tokyo
    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running