BioSysBio

Open review on-line, a new model in publishing conference abstracts.

I wanted to start a discussion about whether OWW could be used for people to edit their abstracts that they submit to the conference BioSysBio & Young Bioinformaticians Forum that I'm involved with (Manchester 2007). Here is an example of what the abstract page might look like.

The abstract submission via openwetware

So we hope to do the abstract submission via the Wiki OpenWetWare.org. People will get assigned a page to publish their abstract on.

• Do abstract submission on-line via OpenWetWare.org (people publish to the wiki)
• DO NOT do open review of abstracts. (although still allow people to discuss them)
• DO normal review of abstracts by faculty/session chairs

Advantages:

• This is much easier to organise the submission and review if the abstracts are open
• First page should be space limited, but an infinite number of pages could be linked to for follow up information.
• Public abstracts should increase the quality of those submitted
• Forming an on-line community before the conference
• Allow others to comment/discuss the abstracts

Disadvantages:

• Will people want to submit an abstract to the world 4 months before the conference? (normally it would remain private until the conference)
• vandalism of others abstracts (I think unlikely)
• people have to learn how to use the wiki (or could just post a jpg of a word document of they really can't do it)
• we have to unlink any abstracts not selected for the conference.

After the short discussion, I have posted a plan for the open review. please let me know what you think. I think it might work, but it almosts seems like it might be more hassle than it it worth. --Johncumbers 21:54, 15 July 2006 (EDT) decided not to go with this idea.--Johncumbers 13:39, 23 July 2006 (EDT)

Another ideas, but we are not going with this one: Open Review

Aim: We want to create an on-line community of scientists that aides collaboration and communication between different researchers. That come together at a conference to present and discuss science. The conference does not begin and end in January, it starts on-line before the conference and we hope it will continue there afterwards as well. www.openwetware.org is already a growing community of scientists and would be a good place to host this.

1. Open conference registration July 06 without payment. (tell people that registration does not mean they have been accepted yet) publicise and register delegates.
2. Ask for short abstracts < 300 words due in late September. (These are kept private on a password protected website)
3. Get session chairs to do a brief review on-line and reject any unsuitable. If we register more than we have capacity for then reject the lowest scoring abstracts to bring the number to venue capacity 160. Accept all others for posters and maybe for oral presentations. (to be decided after open review period)
4. Early October - Ask delegates whose abstracts were accepted to pay registration fee on-line.
5. Ask delegates to publish a longer abstract on the web, including results, pictures, tables and as much supplementary information as the delegate wants to add on other pages (using the wiki at www.openwetware.org) by end of October, they have 1 month to prepare images/ tables, get used to wiki.
6. November is the month of Open Review, where all other delegates are invited to post comments and questions on the web (longer abstracts invite more comments/questions). Open review closes at the end of November. The session chairs then review the long abstracts and make the decision about who will speak at the conference based on these (they should be higher quality due to the open review period). Speakers are notified December 11th (1 month before conference)
7. All posters published on-line two weeks before conference.
8. Publication deadline is 2 weeks after the speaker decisions have been made
9. Abstracts to be published are formatted and posted in journal format on-line. Long abstracts collated and sent to journal.
10. comments added to web after conference as well.

Issues

• The above plan addressesd the fact that people won't want their results public too far before the conference, because they are only made public at the end of October. 2 months before the conference. Is this still too far before?
• What if they want to change their original title/abstract after it has been accepted?
• Other users can edit the abstracts. We have not found vandelism to be a problem on OWW so far.
• The comment system is not standardized, just editing a page and adding comments might get messy.

Comments

• please add comments here --Johncumbers 22:00, 15 July 2006 (EDT)