Open Science at Web Scale: breaking all boundaries?
This presentation seeks to challenge our established notions of the research landscape by extending the boundaries to explore the full potential of 21stC team science. We will examine trends in open science and research practice, including social participation approaches, emergent citizen science opportunities and will consider their possible impact on research policy and development programmes. The talk will address issues of scale and discipline and in particular will consider the challenges of effective data integration and exchange from the small-scale laboratory bench to large-scale synchrotron facilities, drawing on practical exemplars from structure-based science. The ability to use and re-use data in the longer-term, implies a growing requirement for co-ordinated data curation, digital preservation and data management by institutions, projects and individuals. In addition, 21stC team science will require new skills, new roles and significantly enhanced data informatics capacity and capability across the sector. The work of the UK Digital Curation Centre will be used to illustrate a range of practitioner-based models, frameworks and tools to support enhanced engagement and participation by institutional policy makers, library and information services and research practitioners at the coalface. Finally, we will explore some of the wider implications for science and society of this transformational agenda.
About the speaker
Dr Liz Lyon is the Director of UKOLN at the University of Bath UK, where she leads work to promote synergies between digital libraries and open science environments. She is Associate Director (Community Development) of the UK Digital Curation Centre, in which UKOLN is a partner.
She is also author of the direction-setting Dealing with Data Report, published in June 2007, and co-author of the Scaling Up Report published in May 2008. This was an output from the eBank UK project, which explored links between research data, scholarly communications and learning in the crystallography domain. This work is now being extended in the eCrystals Federation Project in which UKOLN is a core partner.
She serves on a number of strategic boards including representation for the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council, the US National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyber Infrastructure and the Thomson Scientific Strategic Advisory Board.
Although Dr Lyon has worked in various University libraries in the UK, her background was originally in Biological Sciences and she has a doctorate in cellular biochemistry.