[Hum-DIS] Talk from Dr Peter Murray-Rust and Cameron Neylon about Open Access, Thursday 15 Nov at ECU MT Lawley

[Kathryn Greenhill]

Hi,

We are very lucky to have a chance to hear Dr Peter Murray-Rust speak. He is a world authority/advocate for Open Access of both data and publications. Attendance would be worthwhile for any students interested in possible future scenarios for information access.


Kathryn Greenhill

Associate Lecturer | Department of Information Studies
School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts | Faculty of Humanities

Curtin University
Tel | +61 8 9266 7173
Mail | GPO Box U 1987 | Perth WA 6845

Email | k.greenhill at curtin.edu.au
Web | http://humanities.curtin.edu.au/about/staff/index.cfm/k.greenhill

[cid:283546C5-7EF4-4F4D-878F-A9795C5A8AD4]

Curtin University is a trademark of Curtin University of Technology.
CRICOS Provider Code 00301J (WA), 02637B (NSW)

Dr Peter Murray-Rust from the University of Cambridge, is currently in
Australia as a guest of CSIRO, and has kindly agreed to come to Perth to
talk to us on the following:

Open Data and Content Mining

The publicly funded research in the Scientific Technical Medical (STM)
literature contains multibillion dollars of unused value. Most scientific
articles contain names, numbers, places, chemicals, organisms, graphs,
tables, etc. which can be extracted and re-used. This leads to better
science, new information products, startup companies, better information
for policy makers and much more which I have estimated  at "low billions"
for chemistry alone. For STM, especially medicine, the figure is much
higher. Yet this is currently unavailable for the reasons: (a) publishing
uses PDF which is a very poor way of conveying the information (b)
publishers actively prevent mining of the content to preserve their
revenues.

We must change this, and soon, though (a) evangelism of the opportunity
(b) lobbying for our rights (c) building the next generation of tools. I
shall cover all these, including our Manifesto on Open Content Mining and
demonstrations of AMI2 - a weakly intelligent amanuensis for the
scientist (based initially on understanding PDFs). This offers great
opportunities for citizenry in general to liberate this vast resource of
valuable information.

Besides Open Data, Dr Murray-Rust has also written on and discussed a lot
of issues around Open Access and academic libraries and our role in
scholarly communication, so this is a great opportunity for us to come
and talk with him. See his blog for more: http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/

In case this wasn¹t interesting enough, Cameron Neylon, a biophysicist
and advocate of open research practice and improved research data
management, as well as Advocacy Director at the Public Library of Science
(PLoS) also happens to be in Perth next week. (See:
http://cameronneylon.net/ ) Cameron has agreed to speak on the following:

Network Enabled Research

The web, like all network technologies before it from the mobile phone to
writing itself, has the potential to enable a qualitative change in our
capacity as people, organisations and societies. We are starting to see
the first glimmerings of how our research capacity might change with
projects like Galaxy Zoo and Polymath but these remain isolated examples.
What will it take to exploit the network capacity that the web brings us
to enable a step change in the efficiency and effectiveness of our
research? There are no complete answers but a growing understanding of
how networks makes it clear that effective scalable networks have
characteristics - scale and connectivity, frictionless resource transfer,
effective user side filtering tools - that are completely at odd with
today's scholarly communications frameworks. Today we limit the scale and
connectivity of networks by concentrating access, we create friction by
perpetuating business models built for physical distribution of paper,
and we use monolithic and non-transparent filters that are hideously
expensive and largely ineffective. An effective global research network
will be built on open content and charged services. Service providers
will compete to offer authors the greatest reduction in friction and
share-ability for their research outputs. Many of these services are not
dissimilar to activities carried out in traditional publishing houses but
getting there from here will not be straight forward. The risk (or
opportunity depending on your perspective) is that in failing to manage
this transition properly we lose the existing human and technical
infrastructure as business models that are no longer fit for purpose fail.

Date: Thursday 15 November 2012
Time: 12:30pm ­ 2:30pm
Venue: Edith Cowan University Mt Lawley Campus (50 Bradford Street, Mt
Lawley), lecture theatre 201, building 3.

Please share this invitation to anyone you think might be interested. (we
have a lecture theatre that seats 240)

Regards,
Con


Constance Wiebrands
Manager: Library Collections and Access
Building 31 Room 450 (31.450)
Edith Cowan University
270 Joondalup Drive
Joondalup WA 6027

Phone: (08) 6304 3723
Mobile: 0447 461 022
Email: c.wiebrands at ecu.edu.au<mailto:c.wiebrands at ecu.edu.au><mailto:c.wiebrands at ecu.edu.au>

Check out the ECU Institutional Repository at Research
Online<http://ro.ecu.edu.au/>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.curtin.edu.au/pipermail/hum-dis/attachments/20121108/0da0fc4e/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 283546C5-7EF4-4F4D-878F-A9795C5A8AD4.png
Type: image/png
Size: 5522 bytes
Desc: 283546C5-7EF4-4F4D-878F-A9795C5A8AD4.png
Url : http://lists.curtin.edu.au/pipermail/hum-dis/attachments/20121108/0da0fc4e/attachment-0001.png