Alex Bateman says protein family wiki is coming – but when?
Nature recently had a nice news article on Bio-wikis and biological databases connected to Wikipedia where Alex Bateman says they’re working on a protein-family wiki that will be hosted on Wikipedia, similar to the Rfam wiki, which he talked about at FEBS this summer. I am of course very excited about this, and hope that the new Pfam (?) wiki will come rather sooner than later. As pointed out earlier, the Nature article also underlines the problem of scientific wikis; currently there is no career incentive to get researchers to spend their time editing wiki-articles. That is a shame, and perhaps a system copying the system of Rfam and RNA Biology could help in this direction. The only question is which journal(s) that would be interested in such a commitment to open science…
Open Science Summit
There’s a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I will not be able to make it to this event myself, but I encourage everyone interested in the future of science that is able to to go there. It is important, interesting, and not expensive. Copy/paste from the website:
Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. (…) The Open Science Summit is the first and only event to consider what happens throughout the entire innovation chain as reform in one area influences the prospects in others.
Tickets are available until Wednesday (the 28th), and the event runs from July 29 to 31 at the International House Berkeley, CA. Please be there for me and represent a movement towards increased openness in science. See this previous post by me for my opinion on things.
Useful links: