Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Open Science at PSB 2009?

I attended a seminar today where we came up with a list of ideas for sessions for the 2009 meeting of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB). This group of people organized a session at PSB 2008 called "Multi-scale modeling", so many of the ideas were related to computational modeling. But since I am interested in Open Science, I asked whether there would be interest in having an Open Science session at PSB.

PSB is a pretty prestigious conference that prides itself on covering only the "hot topics" in biology and biocomputing. Combine that with their locale (Hawaii), and you can imagine it is fairly difficult to get accepted. But even though a session on Open Science would differ from their traditional sessions (less primary research papers, more tutorials / descriptions of experiences / discussion), I think it would be great to talk about Open Science there, since A) PSB is prestigious, B) attendees are probably pretty forward-thinking, C) by Jan 2009, we will be ready to have some really productive discussion, and D) did I mention Hawaii?

The deadline for submitting a session proposal is Feb 8th, which is in only a couple weeks. If there is support for this, I will try to carry it through. Here is the call for papers, which includes guidelines for what makes a good session, and responsibilities of a session chair. I'm not sure that I would be the best choice for a session chair since I have not participated in an open science endeavors yet and the session chair is required to give a 1 hr tutorial on the session topic, so if anyone is interested in being the session chair, please let me know! Ideas for what kind of papers could be solicited would also be appreciated.

2 comments:

Pedro Beltrao said...

Hi and welcome :). This sounds like a great idea. Is there anything we could do to help out ?

Anonymous said...

Thanks! I will post about this since I just got some additional information about whether this session would be received well.