Scientific Writing and New Patterns of Scientific Communication

Scientific Writing and New Patterns of Scientific Communication

Half day workshop

Maternushaus, Cologne, 24 June 2009
Adelheid Room

Workshop organisers:
Julian Newman, Glasgow Caledonian University
Esther Breue, University of Koeln 

http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference-09/

Background

Scientific writing is difficult to learn. In particular, the writer needs to learn to construct an argument within the conventions of a discipline, balancing the need to show originality with the need to ground the argument in a body of existing knowledge and relevance structures.

 Recent controversies surrounding new methods of scholarly communication, exploiting so-called “Web 2.0” technologies, implicitly raise issues concerning the need for science to be communicated in multiple genres. New forms of communication for scientists, influenced by “Web 2.0”, include specialised “social networking sites” – sometimes referred to as “MySpace for Scientists” – which host blogs and discussion boards, and may support the setting up of collaborations, “referral sites” which support the tagging of interesting items from the literature, and/or online reference management, wikipedia-type secondary information sources and online videos of experiments and/or visualised data.  Scientists have always had informal registers for “talking shop”, discriminable from the communications of the formal journal paper: the issue inevitably arises, whether they now need to develop special writing or production skills for the dissemination of ideas and results in new media. 

 The ideas of the Free Software movement and the Creative Commons attack upon the excesses and perceived corporate abuses of Intellectual Property protection have given rise to the Open Science movement.  It is claimed that Open Science will facilitate massively distributed collaboration by making clear accounts of the methodology, along with data and results extracted therefrom, freely available on the internet.  Science Commons, set up in 2005 under the aegis of Creative Commons, aims at reusability of scientific research, simple access to research tools and integration of fragmented information sources, arguing that failure to make sense of petabytes of research data being produced around the world is the consequence of relative isolation of scientists and “balkanization” of data. 

The basic institutional assumption of the traditional scientific paper is that the method of investigation should be fully and accurately described within the paper itself in sufficient detail to enable a competent colleague to replicate the experiment, and that the data should be presented in sufficient detail to enable the reader to judge the validity of the conclusions drawn (and many journals also require the deposit of original data as a protection against fabrication of results).   From this point of view it might be presumed that the communication skills necessary for Open Science are already inculcated in traditional scientific writing.  A contrary view suggests that the compressed style of the journal paper may act to exclude the majority of potential readers from full understanding or serious evaluation of such publications, and that the involvement of trained amateurs in scientific data collection and in the evaluation of theoretical results ought to be encouraged.  Thus the public should be engaged in science as practitioners and not merely as recipients of pre-digested results. 

Likely Participants

Researchers in Composition, Scientific Communication, Science and Technology Studies, Information Sciences, Philosophy of Science and Technology, Language Learning, Computational Linguistics, Networked Learning, Virtual Communities.

Agenda