Category Archives: Open Access

Open Access, Web 2.0

What Twitter does

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The Increasing Utility of Twitter:
[Via Eye on FDA]

While the regulatory side of new media has been muddled by recent FDA contradictions in what it says and what it does, the media themselves continue to develop. Twitter, in particular, has enjoyed both growth and high visibility. And, not only are there increased uses for Twitter, but there are increasing ways to monitor and analyze trends among Twitter users.

First, let’s talk about the increasing number and types of people utilizing Twitter. There are not exact numbers that can be quoted in terms of the number of people who are starting Twitter accounts, but anecdotally, this can be said. On March 17, the Eye on FDA Twitter feed had 700 followers. Three weeks later, that number increased by about 28%. That is substantial growth in less than a month. In addition, I noticed that the number of followers that many new followers and the number of updates have been on the low side, indicating that they have not been on Twitter very long as of yet.

Twitter is becoming the place to go in order to find out close to real-time information. There are corporations, foundations and journals all using Twitter.

The power can be seen by this experiment:

Why are they coming to Twitter? It is fast. Here is a graph that demonstrates a Tweet I sent out not long ago that asked my followers (700 at the time) re-tweet to followers, which 40 of them did. I counted the followers of those 40 who re-tweeted the message and found that it went out to 26,000 people – within 6 hours of the original request. Twitter allows you not only to keep in touch with your constituency, but to extend your reach beyond to people and networks who might otherwise never notice you.

Echo Chamber

This, coupled with the ability to follow specific terms used in these online conversations, means that a very large group of people can get the information very rapidly.

And there are a slew of applications that can make Twitter even more useful.

Open Access, Web 2.0

And the tools that permit us to watch

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austin by Hi I’m Santi
What Should Corporations Do With Their Blogs:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

I was fortunate to be able to call together a great group of people at a moment’s notice to host a flash panel at the Pepsico Podcast Playground at SXSW. I wanted to talk about a Wall Street Journal article where AMD blogged about something and then Intel said blogs weren’t the place to talk about important issues. I pulled together George Smith, Jr, from Crocs, Christopher Barger from GM, Keith Burtis from Best Buy, Bonin Bough from Pepsico, Pat Moorhead from AMD, and Morgan Johnston from JetBlue for a conversation.

What follows is a video from the flash panel. I hope you’ll watch it and share your thoughts.


SXSW Flash Panel: Corporations & Social Media from Kipp Bodnar on Vimeo.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

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Not only is this an very nice discussion of corporations and Web 2.0 approaches, it is also a video of an ad hoc meeting that could not have been seen just a few years ago.

The content is very interesting with charismatic people talking about something they are really focused on. The panel was put together very rapidly rather than planned out long ahead of time. It demonstrates the need to be agile and resilient when it comes to being innovative.

The technology that allows us to see this video requires tools that we now take for granted. It requires easy access to video to record the presentation. It requires a tool to permit the video to be edited and then a tool that allows the video to be displayed online.

This is a mashup of so many technologies, all to display a discussion about corporate blogs.

All to allow us to hear and see real executives, real people, discuss the problems and benefits of a particular Web 2.0 technology. It is a wonderful example of how ad hoc meetings can very rapidly disburse information to a large group of people.

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Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Web 2.0

Control when needed

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rocket by jurvetson
Respecting Control:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

We are in a time of change and new innovations. This impacts how we interact with each other. It will take a while to work out all of the kinks but we have a nice discussion of some of them here.

Posting Of Sensitive Documents

Much angst and concern exists in corporate social media projects around this issue — everyone wants to encourage more sharing and collaboration, but not every internal document is meant for every employee’s eyes.

And there’s no easy answer.

Push the pendulum too far in one direction, you’ll end up with hundreds or thousands of gated discussions that just end up being a fancy dumping ground for documents that no one can read, and no one can discuss.

We’ve lived in this world, we don’t want to go back to it.

Push the pendulum too far in the other direction, and there will be a backlash against the corporate social media problem. It’s a reality of the corporate world that not everything can be shared with everyone.

We’d like to avoid onerous corporate policies, content review processes, etc. — all the 1.0 backlashes that can result when people think something has gotten a bit out of control.

Working out the distinct elements of these contradictory needs (openness vs. hiddenness) can have huge impacts on an organization’s ability to succeed. The Intelligence agencies of the US are an example where the posting of internal documents must be controlled due to secrecy issues.

Yet, they created Intellipedia which has had a huge effect on their ability to accomplish their mission. The issue is risk management, not risk avoidance.

Making everything open is not really management, or it is the weakest form of management. Just as keeping everything closed is not really management either. The key is finding a level of risk management that actually enhances the efforts.

A particular problem of these technologies is that they are often started by individuals that want to enhance their own productivity. They put up documents because it helps them and their groups. But this is where problems happen.

A very senior individual in the organization expresses significant concern and anxiety for posting of sensitive document — and isn’t quite sure how to handle the situation.

Posting individual makes a strong case for increased information sharing across the organization as a part of better business practices and the general good. In theory, yes, but …

Very senior individual makes a strong case for more restrictive policies, review, enforcement, policing, etc. of the social platform. Wants to do the right thing, but damage exceeds benefit in their eyes now.

Now, everybody is unhappy. Instead, the discussion should be on the management side, not the risk side. And guys at the top are more responsible for risk than guys lower down. So, their concerns need to be respected.

Put plainly, if you’re in charge of a business unit or function, you should have some say in what sort of things get broadly shared, and what sort of things have a more limited internal audience.

And having an internal social media platform with lots of proficient people who tend to share everything they come across shouldn’t take that measure of control from those senior individuals.

Social media is supposed to empower people, and not render them powerless. And that list of empowered people should include very senior managers and executives.

As we work out the social mores for these behaviors it is important to put a little thought into the process. Just because something is cool or important does not mean it has to be made available to all.

And as we respect control more, those in responsible positions will respect freedom more. And remember this,

Mistakes Will Be Made

Many of us who are active on the social platform have made the same mistake — we’ve broadly shared something we thought was interesting, but we missed the fact that someone who has responsibility might not agree with us.

The recovery formula is pretty simple:

– immediately apologize and admit the mistake
– offer to take the document immediately down
– acknowledge their concerns and right to control certain kinds of information being widely shared
– express a sincere intent to do better in the future
– and apologize again

Respect has to work both ways for these tools to be effective. The leaders need to know that most information can be more effective when spread and the users need to realize that the leaders exert ultimate control.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

The benefits of Creative Commons licenses

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What happens when you set your content free with creative commons licensing?:
[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Winner of the Creative Commons 2006 Photo Schwag Contest

I believe in setting my content free. It provides a huge return on investment. Here’s why:

A way to crowd source ideas. People can add and embellish your content and if you have access to the remix, it can give you new ideas
It creates a gift economy and that help you build your network
It gets your work out there. My photos and blog posts have traveled around the world!

I use the “BY Attribution” creative commons license. I’ve used this license now for four years because it is simple, direct, and easy. “You are free to use the content, just me credit and/or a link.”

Creative Commons provides an easy way for individuals to control their IP without needing a huge array of lawyers. In fact, it permits one to easily make things available for others in ways that benefit everyone.

I’ve talked about using Flickr as a photo resource. It is easy to provide attribution and a link. Most people are honest and will do this to provide a benefit for those providing the photos. And for those who chose to be dishonest … well the Web has a billion eyes and it is very likely that someone will notice. Openness and transparency can sometimes help provide a reasonable governor on poor behavior.

All of this assumes that people really bother to look at the license, understand it, and respect the rules. I still sometimes see rather blank expressions when I ask about turning to CC licensed resources to find photos. It turns to surprise when they see what is there and it free for the using. Or, I get gasps of horror from some colleagues who more concerned about how to “lock up” their content with “all rights” reserved and hire IP lawyers to help them police and protect their work so no one “steals it.”

The possible benefits outweigh the possible detriments. But it may take a generation (probably only an Internet one, though) to change attitudes. But, as I mentioned in another post, even large pharmaceuticals are recognizing the benefits of opening up some of their IP.

Here’s a few (good) examples of how I have remixed other people’s work or other people have remixed my work.

1. Remix This Powerpoint. The powerpoint slides came from a webinar I did a couple years ago for University Extension professionals. The title was “Ten Steps to Extension 2.0.” The presentation itself is a remix of a remix. I remixed it from an earlier presentation called Associations 2.0 which was based on Marnie Webb’s Ten Ways To Use Web 2.0 to Change The World. It also incorporates cc licensed materials from others, including videos and flickr photos.

The cover is from a remix mashup that Mike Seyfang and I did a couple years back from a conversation about the least restrictive creative commons licensed. That photo is one of my most viewed flickr photos and resulted in a number of inquiries for work.

A difficulty with scientific presentations is that the copyrights of the graphs and figures are not even owned by the person who did the work. Scientists have historically turned over all copyrights to the publisher in order to get published in the first place. If you want to get published, you had to relinquish all rights.

Now this is changing with Open Access but it is still a difficult problem when incorporating data from an article. Most scientists just use the figure, along with attribution. While technically a problem, everyone does it.

You can check the policies of each journal. They are all different. If more papers were published under a Creative Commons license, which they should be since most were financed by public money, it would make it easier for all of us.

2. How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media? This was a blog post that I wrote remixing an earlier blog post with the same title from Nina Simon as part of thinking through some of the material for the WeAreMedia project, another open content project. The illustration is a powerpoint slide that I shared on slideshare. It’s been remixed with and without attribution. Many do not add more improvements on the idea itself, but rather just cut and paste. A number of folks have sent back thanks for saving them some time in prepping a presentation.

There was a brilliant example of remix from Morgan Sully who took the idea and remixed it for electronic musicians. Creating a remix that goes beyond cut and paste, takes some time, creativity and higher thinking skills!

Adding context or new information is a great reason for being able to remix. This is still problematic with a lot of scientific information since usually all rights are reserved. What is fair use then?

When I remix someone else’s work, I go to great lengths to give it proper attribution. But, I never know if people who have remixed my work have done so in return. Now there is an easy way to track it.

Attributor Corporation and Creative Commons have just launched FairShare which is now in public beta.

The press release describes it as:

A free service allowing bloggers and individual content creators to understand how their work is shared across the Web. FairShare allows anyone creating text content to submit an RSS feed of their work and choose a Creative Commons license to determine how it can be shared. Users then receive license-specific results via RSS with detailed insights into how and where their work is reused.

The FairShare service enters public beta supporting six Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative reuse of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. The FairShare service will be integrated with the Creative Commons license selection process and available in each of the 12 languages that FairShare currently supports.

FairShare helps make the Creative Commons “Sharing Economy” vision a reality by enabling millions to reuse content in a way that provides a value back to the original content creator – value that each creator can define for themselves.

As you know, I do a fair amount of listening, so when I using monitoring tools I can see exactly who is using my content and in what context. That is if they mentioned my name or linked to me. My goal in using this tool is not to police my content. Rather, I want to see how it is being remixed so I reap the benefits of the Sharing Economy.

Update: Article in the LA Times

This is a great example of how mashups can use data in ways no one had anticipated. RSS was not designed to do this but FairShare can manipulate the data from RSS to make it not only easier for the creator of content to control their work but also to track ow others are using it. This only serves to foster information flow, helping increase the rate of diffusion of innovation in an organization.

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Knowledge Creation, Non-Profits, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Opening sources for Biotech

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Genentech open sources Unison: [Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JULY 14: Pedestrian...Image by Getty Images via Daylife While on the subject of open and pharma, a bioinform article (sub reqd) tells us about Unison, a protein sequence analysis platform from Genentech that has been released under the Academic Free License (why not the Apache License since they are very similar). What is Unison? Unison is a compendium of protein sequences and extensive precomputed predictions. Integration of these and other data within Unison enables holistic mining of sequences based on protein features, analysis of individual and sets of sequences, and refinement of hypotheses regarding the composition of protein families

Essentially Unison is a data warehouse, which includes a number of protein sequences, and a bunch of pre-computed data. They have also released the complete schema, API, and some of the predictions. The backend is PostgreSQL and the platform leverages the BioPerl API. So the web service serves as a reference implementation of the Unison platform. People can essentially replicate the system and contribute code within their own servers using.

I think that biotech/pharma companies may do this more and more. The advantages for a company do not really come from these particular tools but how they are used and interpreted. Making this available to a much larger group means it is more likely to yield useful results. Genentech can only do so much with these tools. If someone else uses them to find something novel, some thing that Genentech did not recognize at all, Genentech might be able to reap some rewards that they would not have if they had kept things to themselves. Even if they do not get rewards directly, the publicity is worth something. They see this as a way to extend their influence rather than something for competitors to use against them. By furthering collaboration and increasing the number of eyeballs using their tools, Genentech can accomplish some things that would be difficult to do with their cards held close.

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Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Not such a killer, perhaps

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tubes by Hey Paul
Why article tagging doesn’t work:
[Via Bench Marks]

Reading William Gunn’s recent blog posting, Could this be the Science Social Networking killer app? got me thinking more about the many online scientific reference list repositories like Connotea, CiteULike and 2Collab, and why they are failing to catch on. William is suggesting a Pandora-like system of expert reviewers tagging papers to set up a recommendation system. I’m not sure this would be really helpful–what you get from a scientific paper is very different from what you get from listening to a song, and their interconnectedness works in very different ways. And it brings to mind the failings of organizing your references by tags.

If you’ve ever dealt with any of these social bookmarking sites, you know how incredibly tedious they are to use. Even for journals like CSH Protocols, where we have buttons on every article to add it directly to these sites, you still end up jumping through hoops, filling out forms, writing summaries, adding tags. You’re on the spot at that moment to come up with a list of tags that will remind you about the content of that paper. As your worldview changes over time, and with it your research priorities, you’re probably going to want to revisit many papers and add additional tags. Even with all this time-consuming work, you still may not have added an appropriate tag to let you find what you want to find at a given moment. Did you add a tag for every method used in the paper? Every conclusion, every subject referenced? That band on the gel in figure 3 that you’re ignoring today might be very important to you tomorrow. How are you going to tag the paper in case you need to find it again?

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I totally agree with David. There are two kinds of list-making people in the world – those that make lists and those that don’t. Applying tags to articles works well for the list-makers but many, many scientists are just too time-deprived to fill in boxes or check off squares.

But the real problem, as notes, is that in research the semantics change very rapidly. A paper that was really useful for a its description of a new cell surface marker may, at a later date, become important for a particular technique. How are you supposed to know beforehand which tags to use.

And in many cases since the research is at the cutting edge, there are no appropriate tags. So I make up one – call it IL-99. But someone else working on the same protein, adds a new tag called EDFWR. How in the world to the tags properly link these papers?

And, finally, no researcher gets any credit for really annotating a paper. Taking the time to do this, or to recommend a paper, is time they can be focussing on getting tenure, getting a grant in or writing a paper. Where is the payoff to the individual scientist?

Tagging research is not an easy problem to fix. We may all agree that it is worthwhile but we are a long way from any reasonable solution.

Open Access, Web 2.0

Broken filters?

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filter by mrpattersonsir

Information overload is NOT filture failure:

This has been bothering me for a while now, dating back to last year, when I first heard Clay Shirky’s very pithy statement that information overload isn’t a real problem, the real problem is a failure to build effective filters. It’s a catchy little phrase, and like most theories from Web 2.0 gurus, it seems reasonable on the surface, but when applied to the world of scientists, it’s less than useful.
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Shirky has a habit of making pithy statements. I often disagree but I have to say they lead to some interesting conversations, so I listen to what he says. He forces one to concentrate.

David is someone else I listen to. His perspective is often different than mine but it is one well worth examining. How do we deal with more information than we can individually examine? How do we figure out a way to separate the wheat from the chaff when we have no way to examine it all?

The Web is not going to replace methods of information dispersal that have stood in good stead for many years. Publication in highly regarded journals will always be an important avenue. It will most likely always be the place for the interesting stuff.

The key is not that there is more interesting stuff out there than we can read in a lifetime. The problem is that the interesting stuff is overrun with extraneous, uninteresting stuff. Important papers also get published in obscure journals. How do we find them?

In Shirky’s example, if the entire contents of a Barnes and Noble is dumped in front of us, the good stuff (i.e. Auden and Plato) will be overwhelmed with the irrelevant.

The library system has come up with some ways to help. But even characterizing books by topic does not really produce a solution. In many ways, finding the good stuff is dependent on social mechanisms. We read a review in a magazine. A friend tells us about a great new read. A speaker quotes from someone. A teacher points the way. Another book discusses the thoughts of a prior author.

Human beings act as filters to help us deal with information overload. Our social network helps us find the information relevant to us.

Similarly, in my research, I have been led to more of the important papers for my work by someone I trust saying “Hey, I read this article you might like” than I have by scouring PubMed. I see a presentation at a conference and ask the speaker a question. His answer leads me to another paper. I have a beer with a colleague who mentions an interesting paper. I read a review article and use the references to find the paper with the protocols I need.

All parts of my social network.

Published papers are not going to go away. The vetting possible by peer review is a requirement for a certain type of scientific work. Random strangers will have little impact on this.

But leveraging online social tools so that a community of scientists can more rapidly find the important papers it needs could possible create a filtering mechanism that can help deal with some of the information overload.

Personally I feel that these online communities will be more informal in nature than Shirky does. That is, they will more likely arise from a group of colleagues working together than from an organized committee. Time will tell.

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Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Web 2.0

Collaborate to survive

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Collaborative Paper: What to do in the nonprofit sector to offset the economic crash.:
[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Source: Foundation Center Focus on the Financial Crisis

The map image above is an interactive map that displays the distribution of the most recent support by U.S. foundations to aid those affected by the downturn. Drill down to see the details. It’s part of the Foundation Center’s aggregated page of articles, podcasts, data, and resources that Focus on the Financial Crisis. You can updates through RSS. Excellent example of aggregation strategy and really clear and good information design.

This is a nice example of an organization using Web 2.0 tools to help the community in ways that would have been difficult before. And not only can you access the data to study it, but you can get updates via a newsfeed so new information is brought to you.

Marty Kearns has set up a collaborative paper and discussion on a wiki. The paper is called Cascading Failure. Marty is convinced that the answer on how the nonprofit can understand and survive this meltdown is out there in network and has set up a space for us to kick it around.

At this stage, it is clear that nonprofit and advocacy groups are headed for extraordinarily difficult financial times. The cash crunch for the advocacy movement will be as bad as we can imagine and far worse than we can easily manage. We need a plan for how to remain effective. We should all begin to operate with new assumptions.

You can find the paper along with some draft prescriptions for organizations. One the recommendations is:

Invest in Social Capital. It will be the only growing market in 2009. Look at it as part of your organization: There have always been good reasons to build your social network, but now it is a matter of strategy and applying the techniques of network weaving. You need social capital to help in difficult times. I set up a page to brainstorm some practical tips, strategies, and resources.

There are also some draft recommendations for individuals working within advocacy movements.

So. not only is a draft paper available to all, but individuals and organizations can add their own value to these ideas with online discussions. Thus, novel ideas and innovations are able to rapidly traverse the networks that are created. The increase in the rate of diffusion of creative solutions may just be critical in finding a way out of this mess.

Non-Profits, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

The science commons

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Supporting the Commons: Jesse Dylan and Richard Bookman:
[Via Science Commons]

Today, we are proud to announce the release of Science Commons’ first informational video. The video was directed by renowned director Jesse Dylan, the director of the Emmy- award winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video with musical artist will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. The video can also be seen on the front of sciencecommons.org.

“I believe Science Commons represents the true aspiration of the web, and I wanted to tell their story,” Dylan said. “They’ve changed the way we think about exploration and discovery; the important and innovative ideas need to be shared. I believe it’s vital to revolutionizing science in the future. I hope this is just the beginning of our collaboration.”

This video is launched in conjunction with a letter of support from Richard Bookman, the Vice Provost for Research and Executive Dean for Research and Research Training at the University of Miami. Bookman joins a group of esteemed Commons supporters featured in this year’s “Commoner Letter” series, including this year: Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia University, Renata Avila – CC Guatemala Project Lead, and singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton. More information and an archive of past letters can be found at http://support.creativecommons.org/letters.

In his letter, Bookman writes:

“We need to find ways to make sharing research results and tools easy, trackable, and useable by scientists on a day-to-day basis. Science Commons is working on these problems in a way that few other projects contemplate: they don’t write papers, they release “running code” like contracts for sharing biological materials and open contracts for biological tools like stem cells and genetically modified mice. […]

I support SC/CC because I think it’s the right approach at the right time. It’s vital that we as a community support the organization – the interstitial nature of what gets done at CC makes it harder than many might think to raise money, which can leave the most important work dying for lack of funds.

I hope everyone in the community can dig deep and support CC during this campaign. When you support CC, whether because of the cultural work, or the education work, or the science work, you’re supporting an organization that is much more than contracts and websites and videos. You’re supporting an umbrella organization working around the world that lives and breathes the “some rights reserved” philosophy.”

Our thanks to Jesse Dylan, Professor Bookman, and the broader CC community for their ongoing support. For more information about the campaign, or to show your support, visit http://support.creativecommons.org. Every little bit counts. Help support the Commons.

Science Commons has a very strong role to play in getting scientists to actively develop the web in ways that can benefit everyone, including themselves. In particular, Health Commons is a project that may provide a place for biologists to ‘remix’ their data in profound ways. If we can only get them to think about the Commons in the pursuit of their work.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

How the world changes

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LinkedIn Applications: I just added my blog and slideshare content! Wow!:
[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

LinkedIn is a professional network for business and (and nonprofit professionals.) It is often described as an online social network for job seekers. Perhaps because initially your profile was structured like an online version of your resume. Let me tell you, LinkedIn can be a terrific place to develop professional contacts, grow your business, and promote your work and opportunities. There are many good reasons why nonprofit professionals use online professional networking sites liked LinkedIn.

Earlier this week LinkedIn announced its applications platform that includes a small number of well-chosen apps that can enhance your professional networking profile. You can add your blog content, slide shows, reading lists, files, business travel, and more. (Chris Brogan calls the addition of adding your business travel schedule “dog clever.” Since LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking site that can help you find job prospects, works prospects, and

For my profile, I added BlogLink (it posts my blog posts to my profile automatically) and SlideShare’s Application. (In the video above SlideShare’s CEO Rashmi Sinha demonstrates the application.)

LinkedIn had quickly become a vital tool if you work more so than even a Rolodex. It is an example of how new online tools can leverage our connections and make them much easier to access.

Besides our own network, we can join groups of like-minded people and develop other connections. I have used it to track down old friends, to market seminars I am giving, to answer questions that others pose and generally keep in loos touch with a wide range of people and interests.

The ability to easily add applications really enhances the usefulness of the site. Many organizations have opened up their applications for others to use. This allows these sorts of innovations and provides these applications markets that would have been difficult to accomplish otherwise.

Now people can connect to what they are producing at other sites, automagically have that placed on their LinkedIn page, allowing others to get a good idea of what we are capable of. Not only is this easier to use than a Rolodex but now it can present a much more robust view of our work.

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