OpenWetWare:Headquarters/Research Pathway Brainstorming061308

Tools to facilitate establishment of collaborations

This topic seemed like an overarching theme, so I pulled all related ideas. Numbers in brackets indicate which step of the research cycle they came from. - BC 14:10, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

• • Ideas Marketplace (1)
  • Prizes, rewards, and competitions that will motivate people to work together (1 and others)
  • Microcredit for specialists who only want to work on part of the problem -> Attaching your credentials to a chunk of data (4)
  • System for outsourcing experimentation (4)

General

• Tools/protocols for choosing what to work on and choosing when to stop
• Mechanisms for enabling team projects (what prevents it now?)

3 Background Research:

Opportunities for better Referencing

• crowdsourcing for background research. What are the standard set of references/citations for X. DOIs for sets of references; abstraction for references

• What’s the right way to present your data?
  • best practices for reporting data
  • open data conventions; examples for presenting data; (e.g. error bars and statistics)
• Meta-level tools for finding publications
• A way of conducting semantic research of articles and a way of extracting info from them
• A way to ask research questions and find the right people who can answer

3.5 Background Research -> Experimentation

• Open funding and microfunding. Outsourcing in a lab. Lab needs resources, can plug into a microfunding model or network

4 Experimentation:

• Standardized interfaces for controlling instrumentation via OWW
• A reward system for amateur researchers
• An academic “innocentive” for research: Is there a way to orally ingest perfume?” “I’d like a biobrick vector that does X” Research marketplace; could be a mailing list; Craigslist for research
• Consensus protocols: Standardized versions of protocols that are easy to find and free;
• Different kinds of protocols and methods that provide information and how-tos for all phases and aspects of research;
• Building communities and networks at all steps on the cycle,
• Mechanisms for specialization in communities
• Better ways of getting your activities out in the world; subscribe to your colleagues’ work;
• Community building in the experimental cycle; example is a feed of “everyone else who’s using this protocol.”

6 Analysis

• An easy way to integrate your data into other people’s data sets

8 – 11 Publishing Cycle:

• A way to apply peer review earlier than the publication phase; rolling, cycle-wide peer review; PR at the idea stage

(Dotted line to …)

• Mechanism for capturing the value of negative results; collecting all the stuff that doesn’t make it into the paper like peer review; deleted scenes, the director’s cut; alternate endings
• Implement CVS for publication: from submission to publication;
• Design a publication process where the author has control; a centralized document with continuous version control. (As you hit a point in the review process should be less back and forth between you and the publisher, fewer publication delays.)
• Build tools for writing: Drew envisions “A sea of unreviewed manuscripts” where the editor comes to you. A manuscript marketplace. Allows for …
  • feedback on rougher manuscripts
  • less stigma for having an error
  • Metric of error correction for each publication – finer-grained metrics

11 – 1 Publication -> Ideas:

Research is not conducted in vacuum; there’s a need to couple conclusions and publications with the next set of questions.

• Need a mechanism for going from a publication back into to the idea pool
• Need a mechanism for others (possibly nonresearchers) to pose questions, problems, ideas for research