Portland, OR
April 17-19
https://www.force11.org/meetings/force2016
April 17, 2016
Workshop – OpenRIF and VIVO
Organized by Melissa Handel. Good crowd. Good presentations. Here's the VIVO presentation. https://figshare.com/articles/OpenRIF_and_VIVO/3180373
Met Steve van Tuyl from Oregon State
Workshop – Organizational Identifiers
Organized by CrossRef, ORCiD, THOR, DataCite
Big crowd
Why and how will we get organizational identifiers. PIDapolooza, Reykjavik, November 9-10, 2015
Met Micah Altman, MIT http://micahaltman.com/
Met Stacey Konkiel, Altmetrics
Hacking the OpenVIVO Data
Well, a small group got together and shared some things about their work. Simon Porter showed us an early version of his Twitter Bootstrap UI for VIVO – very impressive – lean, modern look, responsive interface, improved access to information. Looking forward to seeing more about this.
April 18, 2016
Plenary Session
Cameron Neylon
Melissa Haendel working on phenotypes. Introduce http://openvivo.org from the podium.
Steven Pinker, Harvard – why we communicate badly
Caesar Hidalgo, MIT – data visualization
Christie Nicholson, Journalist – Communicating Science, Distilling your message. She used a baseball situation as a test case – baseball is complex to the non-initiated. How to describe what is happening. Paul Groth started, followed by Kristi Holmes. I gave it a try, using a bit of radio commentator flair, and focusing on the emotion (rivalry, tension, opportunity) in the situation. I finished with a flourish "and this game is over!" People responded enthusiastically. The moment was captured in the cartoon graphic produced for the conference. I spoke with the artists – who knew little about baseball, but were enthusiastic about my short adlib.
Panel with Pinker, Hidalgo, Nicholson
John Brownstein, Boston's Children Hospital – HealthMap
Bastian Greshake, http://opensnp.org
Melissa Haendel, OHSU, Phenopackets
Erick Turner, OHSU – research integrity. excellent talk on p-hacking and other techniques for gaming statistical significance. I spoke with Erick after his talk and will follow up regarding a video from the Nova series – "Do Scientists Cheat."
Robin Rice, Edinburgh – Overcoming Obstacles to Sharing Data about human subjects
Erick Jones, Inspire http://inspire.com
Poster session – so many posters. Very little time to see them. Space was very crowded.
April 19, 2016
Plenary Session
Cassidy Sugimoto, Indiana University
Laura Foster, Indiana University – sharing research regarding indigenous people, South Africa
Dora Ann Lange Canhos – Brazil's virtual herbarium
Juan Pablo Alperin – Simon Fraser University
Workgroup presentations – five minutes from each workgroup. Several of the workgroups are very relevant to VIVO: Attribution workgroup created the controlled vocabulary used in OpenVIVO. Data Citation workgroup developing standards. Software citation workgroup developing standards.
Lunch and Poster session. Presented OpenVIVO. Here's the poster. https://figshare.com/articles/OpenVIVO_A_VIVO_anyone_can_join/3175072
Innovation challenge.
Bianca Kramer – results of world-wide survey on scholarly communication tool usage and research workflows. 65% of researchers using ResearchGate
Maryann Martone – defining the Scholarly Commons.
Phil Bourne – summary of the conference
Comments
Very active, lively group. Many workgroups. Unusual conference format – lots of plenary, lots of "important" people talking. Not a lot of interaction. Speakers were entertaining.
The findings regarding ResearchGate are intriguing. Faculty have "escaped" to the walled garden of ResearchGate. No data sharing, no institutional visibility. Closed social network. But the ability to share their work without regard to copyright or copyright violation – people get to read papers on ResearchGate without subscriptions or libraries. Just like the 1970s – contact the author and get a copy of the paper.
Force11 workgroups duplicate work being done elsewhere. The scholarly Commons idea is similar to SHARE/OSF. The citation workgroups are very similar to work being done by research library workgroups.
The focus on "scholarly communications" is both intriguing and odd. It opens the conversation far beyond the scholarly paper – recall the group was founded as "Beyond the PDF" and rebranded as Force11 following a 2011 workshop at Dagstuhl. The community is avante-garde technical, but not very practical-technical. Unlikely that much of this innovation will see practical implementation in software used by researchers. But as an idea generation group, Force11 appears to be quite successful.
