Two different fronts in the campaign to bring data into the fold of scholarly communication have seen remarkable progress in recent years. One is the shift in policy and practice towards greater availability of research data underlying publications. Another is the advent of many large-scale efforts to extract structured information out of the scientific literature. Scientific fields dominated by individual investigators and customized data collection pose special challenges to both of these fronts but also unique opportunities. I will discuss some recent findings that inform the design, potential, and limitations of systems to achieve both these ends. My aim is to stimulate a conversation about the future of data publication in "small science" that considers the interplay of both technical and cultural factors.
Speaker(s)
Todd Vision
Vision is a computational biologist with dual research interests in genome evolution and in new modes of knowledge discovery enabled by the rapidly growing volume of scientific information. He is the former associate director for informatics at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, co-founded the Dryad Digital Repository, and co-leads the Phenoscape Collaborative.