• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Keynote: Freeing Science

Abstract

In recent years, the practice of science has been increasingly collaborative, global, large-scale and ICT-enabled. This is true of across the gamut of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Expanding Internet-enabled research activities is much more than a technical challenge, however, as the social and human dimensions have time and again proven to be the source of the most difficult issues to overcome if science is going to continue along the trend of openness and free access. The behaviours of several communities of scientists will be discussed which will be used to launch a discussion of collaboration, mobile data collection, event-driven science, and the complexity of the relationship between people and information.

Bio

Eric T. Meyer, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Meyer studies the social implications of e-science and e-social science as part of the Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) project. He brings an understanding of scientific collaboration from both sides: as a social scientist studying scientific behaviour, and as a participant in the production of scientific knowledge. For ten years prior to joining OII, he was the national (USA) data manager and a researcher working within a large scientific collaboration spanning twelve universities studying the genetic causes of mental health disorders. Meyer’s PhD in Information Science from Indiana University, which was named ProQuest Doctoral Dissertation of the Year, examined how marine biologists who rely on photographic evidence to identify individual marine mammals have seen significant changes in their everyday work practices as they switched from film photography to digital photography.