Science and Development

Nancy Pelosi plugs science infrastructure

2009-01-14T07:49:00.000-08:00

In a Morning Edition interview today, Nancy Pelosi defined infrastructure investment in the 21st century as being composed of "science, science, science and science." What a wonderful thing to hear from the Congress. Roads and bridges are good, but investment in science, technology, and the infrastructure that supports it will do a great deal to help the U.S. economy.

Global space policy? Is this the right direction?

2009-01-09T16:30:00.000-08:00

AAAS reported the following news:
Obama Considering NASA-DoD Collaboration. President-Elect Obama is reportedly considering breaking down some longstanding barriers between NASA and the Department of Defense in an effort to speed up the transition away from the aging space shuttle fleet.

CW: This move could pose a significant threat to potentials for international collaborations. Links between NASA and DoD would change the security requirements attached to space science, choking international links.

Space expert, Dr. Scott Pace, at GWU Space Policy Institute makes the following comment about this story:

"I think the story line is a bit speculative in implying DoD's budget couldbe tapped to help NASA in space launch. DoD and NASA have two very differentpolicy foundations for procurement of launch vehicles. DoD needs assuredaccess to space for unmanned payloads and doesn't have any manned missions.This leads them to pay for a major portion of the fixed costs incurred byEELVs and they don¹t use foreign launchers. NASA buys U.S. commercial launchvehicles for its payloads and doesn't pay for EELV fixed costs. At times,NASA may even use a foreign launcher for science payloads as part of aninternational barter arrangement (e.g., Ariane 5 and the James Webb SpaceTelescope). On the other hand, NASA requires human access to space and hasan architecture that addresses LEO and Lunar missions while enabling futurehuman missions to Mars. That architecture includes COTS options as well asAres 1 and the heavy-lift Ares 5. It¹s certainly possibly that an EELV mightbe used for robotic or even partial human access to LEO as part of COTS, butthe EELVs can't meet the performance requirements for Ares 1, much less thehigher performance Ares 5."

"I don't see the new Administration "confronting" China in space - rather Isee them as being interested in potential cooperative scientific ventures.There will be some topics where a tough line will be needed (e.g., avoidcreating more space debris, stem missile proliferation) but in general, Iwould see more civil space cooperation with China, not less."

2009-01-08T05:50:00.000-08:00

The Global Alliance for Linkages in Science is being formed to promote rational policy towards international collaboration in science and technology. Please come back soon to find out more about this initiative.

Caroline

Upcoming lecture on S&T for development

2009-01-02T07:13:00.000-08:00

Link.

Neat blog and interesting article on scientific collaboration

2008-09-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

http://blog.2collab.com
is a site that discusses sharing scientific information online.
Also, here is a nice article by Paula Hane on the advances being made in using the Internet to enhance scientific collaboration - lots of great links!

Research Sharing Gets New Tools and Goes Trendy by Paula J. Hane Posted On September 4, 2008
Last fall I wrote about several social networking/collaboration projects from Elsevier—2collab and Scirus Topic Pages (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=40102). The initiatives were designed to support academic library communities and their researchers with advanced "Research 2.0" tools. The resources created social spaces in which researchers could work together. These tools offer platforms for shared knowledge to be leveraged for information discovery and evaluation.
Since then, I’ve seen greatly increased activity in this space, with new initiatives popping up in a number of arenas, many related to scientific collaboration, others to more general research organization and networking. Some of the tools emphasize organizing and managing references—an online extension of a software tool such as EndNote. Others emphasize collaborative knowledge sharing.
Research1 (www.researchchannel.org/research1) is a new service being developed by ResearchChannel, with the support of the National Science Foundation. It is now in private beta testing so I haven’t been able to look at it yet, though there’s a video of developers Andre Tan and Nate McQueen discussing it at www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=21151&fID=345. Research1 is a web-based collaboration platform that allows researchers to collaborate with peers and share information with the general public. It offers "project hubs," blogs, forums, wikis, messaging, media management features (for audio, video, slideshows), etc. The organizing team says it hopes that it will become "a service that revolutionizes the way researchers, academics, and the general public interact with one another." It is intended to be highly interactive and engaging. Researchers are encouraged to share their content under a Creative Commons license, though they can also choose to allow only colleagues or the media to use their content.
ResearchChannel is a nonprofit media and technology organization that was founded in 1996 by a consortium of research and academic institutions to share the valuable work of their researchers with the public. ResearchChannel, operated at the University of Washington, is now available to more than 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers and its website is visited by more than 1.6 million visitors each year. The channel is also available on 70 university and school-based cable systems in the U.S. and in other countries.
Labmeeting is a new free service that allows academic scientists to organize their collections of papers by uploading their library of PDFs to a private and secure collection. The PDFs appear inside an embedded Scribd window (www.scribd.com). It also provides PubMed search results for papers. Researchers can also connect with others and collaborate with their labs on Labmeeting.com. It is intended for researchers in the biomedical sciences and related spaces. Users must have an academic email address and be a current student, researcher, or professor. Erick Schonfeld interviewed founder Mark Kaganovich for TechCrunch (www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/30/labmeeting-a-social-network-for-scientists) and provided some details of the new social network: "Scientists can recommend papers to colleagues, mark them up, create collections, and follow what other scientists are collecting. Each scientist gets a profile page. By interacting through their research, they are more likely to interact with each other. Labmeeting could also form of basis a community ranking system for scientific papers, based on who is reading, writing, and sharing them."
Mendeley (www.mendeley.com) is Windows/Linux/Mac software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. It recently launched into public beta. The site says that privacy is protected and users can select with whom to share their data. The application automatically extracts metadata, full-text, and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, the online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. The U.K.-based company says it plans to add a recommendation engine.
The sites and services for research sharing do seem to be proliferating at a rapid pace. Here’s a quick review of some of the other ones I’ve been following.
There’s CiteULike (www.citeulike.org), "a free online service to organise references to academic papers of interest and share them with others." The site is now sponsored by scientific publisher Springer (www.springer.com), so I expect to see additional development of this social bookmarking website for researchers.
I’ve written before about Zotero (www.zotero.org), a project from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Zotero is a research tool (available as a Firefox extension) that lets users save, organize, annotate, share, and cite posts. An alliance with the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) will help to create the planned Zotero Commons, which will provide social networking and collaboration opportunities. WizFolio Web 2.0, from a company in Singapore (www.wizfolio.com), offers online journal reference management and sharing of references with colleagues who also have an account. At this point it integrates with PubMed but more sites are planned.
Academici (www.academici.com) offers a technology transfer and knowledge brokering platform, where knowledge can be exchanged and business conducted. It offers both free and premium memberships.
AcademiaConnect.org is a new research sharing social network and scholar directory for academics, researchers, and graduate students of all disciplines. It is currently in private beta release.
Here are some other community research sharing sites: (From a helpful list posted by blogger Bertalan Meskό: http://scienceroll.com/2008/05/24/community-sites-for-scientists-and-physicians-the-list)
BiomedExperts from Collexis (www.biomedexperts.com)
LabSpaces (http://labspaces.net)
Nature Network (http://network.nature.com)
ResearchGATE (www.researchgate.net)
SciLink (www.scilink.com)
Paula J. Hane is Information Today, Inc.'s news bureau chief and editor of NewsBreaks.

Donor assistance and governance of science

2008-08-26T05:21:00.001-07:00

Post to "Knowledge for Development" Blog

2008-08-25T08:58:00.001-07:00

From: John Daly <john.daly@gmail.com>Date: Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 11:17 AMSubject: [Thoughts About K4D] The New Invisible College: Science for DevelopmentTo: john.daly@gmail.com
[http://www.carolinewagner.net/]
I have just read The New Invisible College: Science for Development by Caroline Wagner.
As expected from one of the world's leading experts on international science and technology, it is very good.I have known Caroline for years. We are now both on the faculty of George Washington University (albeit in different schools). We worked together on a White House conference on Biotechnology, and have appeared together on panels. More fundamentally, she is the author of a series of reports going back decades which quantified the nature of international scientific collaboration -- reports which informed my own beliefs and work.The book counterposes the internationalization of science through increasingly elaborated global networks of collaboration against the concentration of activity in scientific clusters primarily located in rich countries. (There is a great map showing these clusters, based on publication counts.) Her use of social network analysis to illuminate the changing nature of the global scientific system is especially innovative and illuminating.The book is not only dry statistics, but includes appropriate illustrative examples of research projects and interviews with key informants, making it readable and indeed a pleasant read.The final chapter provides some thoughtful and important recommendations for science policy in developed and developing nations.
My hat is off to Caroline!

Response from John Daly

2008-08-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that there may be a deep parallel in your book's exposition that might be worth exploring.One might consider two spaces. One is our ordinary geographic space. The other is more complex. You have defined a network in which scientists are nodes and coauthored papers are links. One can define metrics on this network, describing the distance between scientists in terms of the numbers and strengths of the linkages between them in the network.There are centripetal forces in both spaces resulting in clustering of scientists. In geographic space scientists cluster in cities which are poles of scientific ferment. in the network space I think scientists cluster around hubs, which may perhaps be especially collaborative scientists or subnetworks of scientists collaborating on a specific subfield of science. I would think that as some geographic areas have many cities as clusters of scientific activities, so to there are larger areas in your network with many clusters of activity that are close to each other.In both cases there are complementary forces: scientists make independent choices as to where to work, based on their interests and on an assessment that the benefits of working in a cluster are worth the costs of doing so; people at the center of the cluster seek to attract others to work with them, again based on an assessment that the costs of attracting others are more than justified by the benefits the others will bring to the cluster.Maps, as we usually draw them, may not be very good at reflecting the difficulty of traveling from one place to another. We could alternatively seek a map based on travel times or on travel costs. So too, the European Union has decreased the difficulty of moving from one scientific center in Europe to another. So conceptualizing a space with both intellectual and geographic dimension to fully describe distance does not seem too odd.In both geography and "coauthorship" space, I think there are centrifugal as well as centripetal forces. In both cases there are scientific needs and opportunities to be explored outside of the major clusters.-- John Daly
http://www.geocities.com/stconsultant/
http://stconsultant.blogspot.com/
http://unescoscience.blogspot.com/
http://unescoeducation.blogspot.com/

Response to John Daly

2008-08-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

Hi John,
Thank you so much for reading the book. I am really glad to know it is interesting to you. Your comments reveal how much time you have spent working on these questions...of course, you are right about international collaborations having to be worth the effort. But what is the incentive to make that extra effort across cultural, time, and language barriers? You are right that transaction costs have gone down, but with that, the number of opportunities have gone up, so people need to choose more carefully than before. I suggest that international collaboration is more attractive precisely because it can be ended relatively easily compared to side-by-side collaboration. Its existence suggests that it must be worth the effort or people wouldn't engage in it in the first place, and it is sustained because it brings value. It is attractive because it does not carry the same social weight as proximate collaboration. And, it encourages people who a re well known to seek out other well known people (basing collaborations on reputation) which I suggest is why the more renowned you are the more likely it is that you are working at the international level. Is all this good for science? not sure, but developing countries need to understand the dynamic in order to use science to build social welfare.
I do not have much interaction with UNESCO, so I am not a good person to talk about their positions on science. But I will recommend the class to students who are interested in that topic.
Again, thanks so much for reading and commenting on my book.
Caroline

Comments from John Daly

2008-08-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

I will probably finish it over the weekend.I don't know whether you have seen this:http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00978It seems to suggest that (Internet mediated) access to scientific publications leads researchers in developing nations to publish more themselves.I am trying to get my mind around the networking results that you present. Certainly the increases in coauthorship and international coauthorship are interesting and deserving of explanation. I think your ideas of self organizing networks of researchers are helpful and go a long way to explain the structure of the scientific communities that are forming. It seems to me that your rule for establishing a linkage might be adapted slightly. The question is whether the collaboration is worth the effort. Will the advantages obtained by entering the collaboration outweigh the costs and difficulties of the collaboration? The impact of improved communication and transportation systems is important in that respect. As the transaction costs go down and as do the delays, then collaborations with lesser gains become more attractive.Let me make a point that has interested me for some time. A scientist can choose to cooperate with a scientist in his country or abroad. Probably half the working scientists in the world were in the United States in 1950; now something like one-third of all working scientists living here. (I haven't looked it up.) That in itself makes it more likely that a U.S. scientist will collaborate with a foreign scientist in 2008 than in 1950. But for all the other 193 countries, their working scientists will face a greater ratio of foreign to domestic scientists. Therefore, I would expect, even were all other things equal, that the ratio of international to domestic collaborations would be higher in other countries than in the United States, (Of course, not everything is equal. It is easier for a scientist in a small country like Belgium, surrounded by other developed nations, to travel to another country than it is for an Ameerican scientist to cross the ocean to collaborate. The EU has established a lot of money to encourage cross-national European collaborations; developing country scientists often depend on collaborations with developed nation scientists to work at all, and are more likely to publish if involved in such collaborations.) Again, it was once the case that Americans accounted for half of all scientific publications, and now account for something like a third. If publications from foreign scientists, working in smaller scientific communities, are more likely to be internationally coauthored, then the higher percentage of foreign authored papers in the mix would account for an increase in international coauthorships in the total. I hope I have made the point clear. Have you been looking at the use of network analysis to identify core groups of research collaborators, surrounded by larger communities of practice, and still larger communities of interest?
John Daly

Book is now available

2008-08-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

The New Invisible College: Science for Development is now available from Brookings Press. Please post comments here. Thank you!

Caroline

The book will be available in June

2008-03-20T08:26:00.000-07:00

The first chapter will be posted on the website in early April.

- CSW

When will "The New Invisible College" be available?

2008-01-31T14:01:00.000-08:00

Hi Caroline,

When can I purchase your book?

Thanks,
Ann