Mozilla Launches Initiative To Adapt Scientific Practice To the Open Web 28
An anonymous reader writes "Today Mozilla announced the Mozilla Science Lab, a project to help modernize scientific practices to make better use of the open web. "Scientists created the web — but the open web still hasn't transformed scientific practice to the same extent we've seen in other areas like media, education and business. For all of the incredible discoveries of the last century, science is still largely rooted in the "analog" age. Credit systems in science are still largely based around "papers," for example, and as a result researchers are often discouraged from sharing, learning, reusing, and adopting the type of open and collaborative learning that the web makes possible.' Hopefully this can be another step in moving away from traditional publishing practices, and encourage a new generation of scientists to make their data available in more useful ways."
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Whatever those real problems in science are and whatever those next generation web solutions are...but Mozilla will be there....*eye roll*
"How Cute" (Score:1)
A little three person project?!
I'll wait until someone with real money decides to properly fund something.
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The Mozilla Science Lab is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which definitely has real money. And three dedicated people who know what they're doing can accomplish a lot.
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Yeah, I could see that statement as being true.
Many fields are so well-developed that in order to stay competitive, researchers must be highly specialized, ignoring all other branches of their discipline for their one specific area of expertise. Time spent learning those other branches is time not spent on the all-important publications. Even though learning about other areas might be better in the long run, the immediate goal of keeping one's job must be met first.
Unfortunately, this seems to be a natural
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Many fields are so well-developed that in order to stay competitive, researchers must be highly specialized, ignoring all other branches of their discipline for their one specific area of expertise. Time spent learning those other branches is time not spent on the all-important publications. Even though learning about other areas might be better in the long run, the immediate goal of keeping one's job must be met first.
In my experience, having worked in physics research, and with connections and friends in chemistry and engineering, this effectively not true. There may be a couple people so overworked they have zero time for extra activities and some are short on time when starting families, but otherwise my colleagues could all easily read extra papers and news in outside areas more so if they wanted to. The issue isn't so much time, it is an actual motivation and interest in other research (which may still partially b
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Bravo (Score:2)
Mozilla's been doing quite a bit of following in the past few years. Nice to see them take on something new and potentially significant. I don't know if they're the right folks for the job (they certainly have the cache') or if they'll succeed, but it's a good way for the Foundation to think that doesn't merely involve mimicking what Google does.
Verification of results (Score:4, Interesting)
I really do believe that incentivizing verification of results and repeat studies (with reasonable limits, of course) would improve scientific research tremendously. However, it's even less likely to take hold than moving away from "publish or perish."
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I completely agree with you. Having gone through graduate school, there was way too much emphasis on publishing something new, and not any interest in verifying. I often would be interested in learning about a topic and verifying the results, but it would be considered wasteful to do, or at the least not contributing to your papers (which must be novel).
Whether Mozilla could help with this or not, I do not know, but I wish there was a good code repository of scientific code example snippets. I absolutely HA
PetPeeve: Where is the Code & Data? (Score:3)
It is obnoxious that someone can publish their results without providing the code & data available for independent verification.
When are we going to return to the _proper_ scientific process & analysis?
How does Mozilla even have a plan to change this broken symptom of "everything behind a paywall" ?
Web of trust (Score:1)
A decentralized peer-to-peer content distribution and review system (torrent). Seeding is endorsement of the content.
List publications endorsed (seeded) by researchers you trust.
Download a publication, read it.
If it passes your scrutiny, you seed it too.
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As long as you are qualified to judge what you download and read, then you can choose to seed it.
If "approval" is not restricted to qualified people (like current peer review process) it's a open door to a big mess!
Massive approval != correct publication. (just look how many people use homeopathy...)
Scientists do leverage quite a bit of web tech (Score:1)
As is, I would say scientists do leverage quite a bit of practices as exemplified by the open web, just it might not be as open to the public.
The last three labs I worked in shared work with a wiki system internally. Friends I know in collaborations more than a couple people also have similar setups. They are usually not open to the public, but access on some of them are granted to people who ask or at least people on similar projects. Usually the hesitation to open it up comes about because the write
Can't wait (Score:1)
Scientists did not create the web (Score:2)
"Scientists created the web"
No—_engineers_ created the web.
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Tim Berners-Lee [wikipedia.org] is a computer scientist. Robert Cailliau [wikipedia.org] is an informatics engineer and a computer scientist. Nicola Pellow [wikipedia.org] was a math undergrad. The Web was created [wikipedia.org] at CERN [wikipedia.org] (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and first deployed to science departments and physics labs like SLAC [wikipedia.org] (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and Fermilab. [wikipedia.org]
So yes, _scientists_ did create the Web.
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Just because the term "Computer scientist" contains the words "Scientist" does not actually make it one. It's a misnomer. Computer scientists are actually either mathematicians or engineers, depending on their specialties.
That's a rather narrow understanding of a fairly broad field of study.
Computer Science [wikipedia.org]:
Computer science or computing science (abbreviated CS or CompSci) is the scientific and practical approach to computation and its applications. A computer scientist specializes in the theory of computation and the design of computational systems.
See also: Applied Science [wikipedia.org]
Applied science is typically (i.e., not always) engineering, which develops technology, although there might be feedback between basic science and applied science: research and development (R&D).
R&D, like say, a prototype networked information system that makes data available on "pages" of hyper-linked text -- a "web" of data. The proof-of-concept came first, the engineering came after.
Also, to put it quite simply, scientists do not create things. They just think about things; engineers create them.
People who "just think about things" are called philosophers. Scientists create a great number of things. If such creations are found to have useful properties, someone then figures out how to efficie