Okay, this post is going to be a shameless plug for a conference I am helping to organize that I think search industry folks should come to: Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest.

So brace yourselves: objectivity is not going to come into play in this post. Forget about that for the moment. The key thing is to get search people into the world of online science, e-science, Big Data, Open Science, and Science 2.0 way more they have been. Opportunity knocks, group.

Why do I care? Because I have loved people who have been seriously ill and I want the scientific process to become more efficient so that medical research can advance and search is a key part of that. I also don’t object to anyone in the search industry making some money and I think that that can happen, too.

Let’s consider what you would learn at Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest.

First of all, Microsoft Research is generously hosting it (and Science Commons is the organizer). This is a good chance for those of us interested in actually seeing what the Microsoft campus looks like to do so and to get an idea of what Microsoft is doing in the realm of tools for higher education and scientific research. There are important things going on.

For instance, one of the slated attendees of the symposium is Lee Dirks, Director of Education & Scholarly Communications in Microsoft’s Research division. And given the troves of scholarship being produced that will have to be searched and rendered searchable it behooves those in the search industry to follow these things.

Another of the featured speakers will be the chemist and Open Notebook Science advocate, Jean-Claude Bradley. If you need a quick grasp of the mountains of data that are going to have to be rendered searchable, check out Bradley’s slideshow “Leveraging Transparency and Crowdsourcing in Chemistry Using Open Notebook Science.”

Don’t be put off by the fact that the presentation is specific to chemistry. Just click through the slides to get a quick grasp of the vast amounts of data and material that not only chemistry but many fields are producing in a wide range of formats and uploading to a plethora of locations on the Internet (wikis, Second Life, Google Docs, scientific social networking sites and specialized search engines like ChemSpider).

And speaking of ChemSpider, one of its creators, Antony Williams, is also to be one of the speakers at the symposium. Williams is a man to know in search because he is an exemplar of someone who bridges the world of Open Science search tools, academia, prestigious scientific societies (in his case the Royal Society of Chemistry) and industry. See my interview with Williams here.

He is a good guy (and a brilliant one) to know if you want to get a grasp on such key matters as how to obtain scientific information on mobile devices—or, in the case of the search industry, how to cater lucratively to those that need to.

As another of the speakers at the Symposium, Cameron Neylon, has said, “Search is crucial for the success of Open Science. As we put more stuff online it has to be possible to find it. This means developments in semantic search, as well as improved computational engines like Wolfram Alpha.”

See my interview with Neylon here.

And what about the matter of Big Data, say in biology and the life sciences? People in search need to gird themselves for the coming avalanche of Big Data. That is where you could benefit by hearing what another of the symposium speakers, Stephen Friend, President and CEO of Sage Bionetworks, will say. Search people need to get a handle on these things. Sage is working with massive amounts of data.

And speaking of enormous amounts of data, the Obama administration is trying to come up with policies on the best way to provide maximum public access to the published results of taxpayer-funded research. The search industry does not seem to have been following this important public policy debate even though it will directly affect its interests. After all, the more good stuff on the Web, the more central the role of search. I strongly advise those interested in search to peruse the archived pages of the policy forum on these matters hosted by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Much of discussion in that forum related to such search-related topics as institutional repositories, PDF versus XML, and what information will be released. It was really fascinating to see the divergent views of publishers and Open Access advocates and to read about such things as the peer-review process (and that alone should interest those in search because more and more of it is moving online and will need to be searched).

Search people really must possess a basic understanding of the Open Access movement, given that public opinion is trending towards greater public access to tax-payer funded research, which means that the mainstream, monopolistic behemoths of sci/tech publishing (think Elsevier) are going to have to adapt to a more Open Access-ruled world. More Open Access, more stuff to search out. And, luckily for those planning to attend the symposium, one of the speakers will be Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition who can explain these potentially momentous changes in the world of scientific communication.

And given that as more and more data is released and more and more scientific articles are written, how will the worth and influence of those articles be measured? That is what another of the speakers at the symposium, Peter Binfield, Managing Editor of the online journal PLoS ONE, will discuss.

I heard Mr. Binfield’s talk at ScienceOnline2010 (and that conference is an absolute must for those interested in scientific communication—which should include savvy people in search) on PloS’s innovative article metrics program.

Thus, there are clearly opportunities for startups in the realm of scientific communication. Just look at the popularity of the research management tool Mendeley, for example.

Okay, so we have seen that a huge amount of science-related material is being produced and that people like Antony Williams are coming up with tools to make sense of it all in certain disciplines like chemistry or Peter Binfield at the article level whatever the discipline. What about the bigger picture of online science and the implications for search, information science, libraries and librarians? That is where the keynoter of the symposium, John Wilbanks, comes in. He is not only a big picture thinker, he is also a doer like Antony Williams in that Wilbanks is working closely with Stephen Friend on the Sage project. These are people that search people need to get to know—and you can do that at the symposium. There is even a t-shirt design contest for those who need help with travel money and hotel expenses during the symposium.

There are some search firms who do get Open Science. For instance, Deep Web Technologies is a leader in designing search engines for online science. Take a look at WorldWideScience.org, for example.

And DeepDyve has an innovative agreement with the reference manager/citation manager CiteULike to enable CiteULike users to get previews of articles of interest to them for around ninety-nine cents in order to determine if they want to pay a considerably larger sum for access to the whole article. DeepDyve’s CEO William Park is one smart fellow—he sees the connections between researchers, established publishers, and tools that researchers use (like CiteULike) that seem to be entirely escaping his counterparts elsewhere in search.

Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest is the place for those in search to get up to speed on key developments in scientific communication.

Thus endeth today’s lecture and sales pitch. -Hope