Registration for ScienceOnline2011 starts today

Registration for the ScienceOnline2011 conference starts today at 12 noon EST. This is the fifth annual conference on science and the web, and will be held January 13-15, 2011 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

This is the second time I will go to the conference – I had a wonderful time in 2009. The discussion around the 2009 session Reputation, Authority and Incentives (moderated by Björn Brembs and Pete Binfield) was really the starting point for my interest in unique researcher identifiers. The conference was also the first time that I met PLoS Blogs partner David Kroll and many other great people.

You will find my name on the preliminary program in a session Having Fun with Citations (together with Melody Dye):

Citations play a central role in science communication, but their role in the traditional scientific publication is often rather boring. We love to count citations for measures of scientific impact, but we spend little time thinking about the context and meaning of citations. In this session I would like to talk about topics ranging from semantic meaning of citations (using CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology by David Shotton), citations of retracted papers, citations of datasets (using Datacite), the importance of an Open Bibliography, formatting of citations using CSL (Citation Style Language), citations in Twitter and other unusual places, citation mutations and the integration of unique researcher identifiers (using ORCID). There is some interesting work on how citation rates follow Zipfian-like distributions; it would be interested to discuss the background and implications.

The exact session format and the other session moderators have not been finalized. There are also at least two related session proposals: How is the Web changing the way we identify scientific impact? (Jason Priem, Paul Groth) and The Digital Toolbox: What’s Needed? (Kaitlin Thaney) – we might combine some of our ideas. And of course, I am also looking forward to again meeting all these wonderful people that are interested in science and the web.