Written on the train on the way from Barcelona to Grenoble. This life really is a lot less exotic than it sounds…   The workshop that I’ve reported on over the past few days was both positive and inspiring. There is a real sense that the ideas of Open Access and Open Data are becoming mainstream.

Today Science Commons sponsored a meeting looking at the policy issues involved in Open Access and Open Science more widely. I blogged James Boyle’s keynote earlier and there was some notes along the way via Twitter.

I’m in Barcelona at a satellite meeting of the EuroScience Open Forum organised by Science Commons and a number of their partners.Â

The UKOLN Institutional Web Managers Workshop is running in Aberdeen from 22-24 July and I am giving a talk discussing the impact of Web2.0 tools on science. My main theme will be the that the main cultural reasons for lack of uptake relate to the fear of losing control over data and ideas. Web2.0 tools rely absolutely on the willingness of people to make useful material available.

I was away last week having a holiday and managed to miss the whole Declan Butler/PLoS/Blogosphere dustup. Looked like fun. I don’t want to add to the noise as I think there was a lot of knee jerk reactions and significantly more heat than light. For anyone coming here without having heard about this I will point at the original article, Bora’s summary of reactions, and Timo Hannay’s reply at Nature.

http://friendfeed.com/e/1b77bc93-d820-4c0b-93f8-bc585546cb7b/Data-Sharing-in-the-Biosciences-a-sociological/ http://friendfeed.com/e/3865430a-3f03-4f58-9851-f8ba37d97f5b/Data-sharing-in-the-Biosciences-II/

Image via Wikipedia I’m aware I’ve been trailing this idea around for sometime now but its been difficult to pin down due to issues with room bookings. However I’m just going to go ahead and if we end up meeting in a local bar then so be it! If Southampton becomes too difficult I might organise to have it at RAL instead but Southampton is more convenient in many ways.

Image via Wikipedia For anyone who is interested I thought it might be helpful to say where I am going to be at meetings and conferences over the next few months.

There has been lots of interest amongst some parts of the community about what has been happening on FriendFeed. A growing number of people are signed up and lots of interesting conversations are happening. However it was suggested that as these groups grow they become harder to manage and the perceived barriers to entry get higher. So this is an attempt to provide a brief intro to FriendFeed for the scientist who may be interested in using it;

Science commons and other are organising a workshop on Open Science issues as a satellite meeting of the European Science Open Forum meeting in July.