M&B Journal Club: Join the Discussion!

[hypnagogue]

I was wondering if any of the denizens of this forum would be interested in starting up an online journal club sort of thing. Essentially, interested parties would start new threads summarizing and discussing scientific papers pertaining to mind and brain sciences, and other members of the club (and anyone else who might be interested) could then discuss it further. We could organize it so that e.g. we have a new article to discuss every week, with different members of the club taking turns.

There's obviously a lot more that could be said about the details of how to organize this and so on, but first I'd just like to put the feelers out there. Would anyone be interested in participating in something like this on a regular basis?

 

[Mk]

I don't know much about Mind and Brain sciences, but I would be very interested in it, if the articles were good.

 

[somasimple]

Hi,

I'm very interested, too. I already summarized some good journals on this page. (but they're not all devoted to neurosciences )

http://www.somasimple.com/online_journals.htm

 

[Q_Goest]

Denizens? Is that like a den citizen? Do we get to lounge around on comfy chairs and smoke pipes and drink tea or must we knaw on uncooked bones rolling around the cave floor? Either is good for me I suppose, just want to know what's expected.

I'd suggest that emailing the paper's author and explaining our denizens are chewing on their paper and would like them to participate often gets the author's attention. I've done that a few times at different message boards, and it generally works out. Makes the conversation more interesting too I think.

 

[detta]

i'd like to be in a journal club

 

[hypnagogue]

OK, so some encouraging feedback so far, but I'd like to see if we can get a few more people in order to make this thing viable.

Just to be clear, my question is not so much who would be interested in following along with the journal club, but who would be interested in being an active member-- that is, would be willing to periodically search for interesting mind/brain science articles and write up summaries and discussions for them, and also to participate regularly in presentations created by other members.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Just to be clear, my question is not so much who would be interested in following along with the journal club, but who would be interested in being an active member-- that is, would be willing to periodically search for interesting mind/brain science articles and write up summaries and discussions for them, and also to participate regularly in presentations created by other members.

Well, I could help out, depending on how much my physics tasks keep me busy. Strings, Branes and LQG has already evolved part way to such a club. We spend most of our time reading and commenting (often arguing) about papers on the preprint arxiv. I have a couple of sources for M&B papers that I could exploit.

 

[cotarded]

If you all are accepting of the disparity between my background (high school) and yours and the limits it brings on the amount of insight and worthwhile discussion I can offer, I'm certainly up for participating in this. Another warning, though: I don't have any journal subscriptions, and the local college's (nascent, used to be a community college) database access doesn't offer near as many full text papers as I'd like, so I'll have to really scavenge about. However, I'm used to this.

I would be willing to discuss whatever the cat (or the somasimple,hypnagogue, or selfAdjoint as it may be) brings in whenever I have a clue as to what it is and feel like my thoughts would be a contribution. And I'd bet my own article/paper posting frequency would be at least once a week.

lates,
cotarded.

 

[hypnagogue]

cotarded, you would be a welcome addition. It's to be expected that everyone will have a pretty widely varying range of knowledge and experience with the kind of topics we'll be discussing. I'd say the only strong requirements are an enthusiasm for learning about and discussing mind/brain topics, and also a willingness to put in the time and effort to contribute.

It seems like we're approaching an acceptable number of contributors, so I think we can begin discussing some of the surrounding issues regarding the club, a number of which were touched upon in cotarded's post.

One thing is journal access. Once again, it's to be expected that different people will have varying degrees of access to journal resources. Optimally everyone would have a chance to read a given paper before the 'official' discussion thread on it is started, but practically speaking we can't expect everyone to be able to access every paper, and I don't think we should restrict the scope of what we can cover by only using articles that we're sure everyone can access. So we'll have to make do with what we can. We could begin by pooling together links for some free, publically available resources like the kind selfAdjoint mentioned so that everyone at least has some easily accessible resources to draw from if needed. (Some resources like this are already listed in the stickied M&B references thread.)

Another thing to talk about is how we should organize this. Originally I was thinking of a fairly structured setup where we would know some time in advance who would be presenting what article on what day, and we'd limit ourselves to one presentation per week so we could really focus on each article as it comes. (To help organize all this, I could create a stickied thread that keeps a running tab of who has presented/will present what articles at what times, with links to the relevant threads for past discussions.)

I definitely think we should still plan in advance who is presenting what on what day to give everyone time to track down and read the relevant articles. But perhaps we could loosen up the structure to the extent that we can have variable numbers of presentations per week, or variable orders in who presents when, or whatever. I think it would be valuable to have ample time before and after a presentation to really digest a given paper and then really be able to focus in on it discussion-wise, but I can also see merits behind flexibility as well. Thoughts on how we should do this would be appreciated. It would be best if we could strike on something that works for everyone, and of course we can tweak things as we go along if necessary.

 

[hypnagogue]

One other issue springs to mind, which is presenting graphical data. It would be nice if, where possible, presentations could display relevant graphs or illustrations from a given paper, either by way of linking to an online image or by attachment to the post. However, I'm not sure how copyrights and proprietary issues and all that might come into play here. Can anyone shed some light on what kinds of images we could and could not post, and under what conditions?

 

[Q_Goest]

cotarded, you would be a welcome addition.

I'll second that.

Regarding how often a new paper is presented, once a week seems a bit much. Cotarded's post regarding McFadden's paper is 3 weeks running now and still generating discussion. Not to say once a week can't be supported, but everyone might not have sufficient time to review in a single week. Which makes me wonder how those people that actually do this for a living manage to make time to read and understand the fresh work that arives at their doorstep on a daily basis. My job doesn't allow that unfortunately.

. . . and of course we can tweak things as we go along if necessary.

yes. Tweaking should not only be expected but be a priority.

One thing is journal access. . . . (Some resources like this are already listed in the stickied M&B references thread.)

There's a lot available. I like http://consc.net/online.html" the best.

. . . presenting graphical data.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but any data presented on the internet is free for use as long as it is referenced. Check with Greg (I believe he's the PF owner) and verify.

 

[Moonbear]

This is a great idea Hypnagogue! I'd definitely be willing to participate (I wanted to start up something like this in biology a while ago, but didn't get much interest then...I think we didn't have enough people focused on anyone area of interest at the time).

Just looking at how much discussion the CEMI paper generated, I think it's a viable option.

As for articles, we may just have to limit ourselves to articles over a year old if we want to keep them accessible to everyone. Many journals make their content freely available after a 1 year period. While I'm at home, I can check which are accessible because I don't use our university server from here, which means I see what the average person not affiliated with a university sees until I enter my login information.

For neuroscience topics, one of the top journals in the field is the Journal of Neuroscience, which makes articles over 1 year old freely available to anyone (you can open them in html or download PDF formats, depending on preference). This is a good resource for articles. http://www.jneurosci.org/contents-by-date.0.shtml

 

[neurocomp2003]

I'd be interested in a year or two.

Thats going to be a lot of a articles if you take the wide range of fields though...i especially found it fascinating to peruse through those brain journals(which really confused me because my terminology wasn't to par as an undergrad... and the AI ones(I found Nanokitty in one).

 

[hypnagogue]

Regarding how often a new paper is presented, once a week seems a bit much. Cotarded's post regarding McFadden's paper is 3 weeks running now and still generating discussion. Not to say once a week can't be supported, but everyone might not have sufficient time to review in a single week. Which makes me wonder how those people that actually do this for a living manage to make time to read and understand the fresh work that arives at their doorstep on a daily basis. My job doesn't allow that unfortunately.

Yes, it's a tenuous balance between having enough time to cover something adequately and not letting things drag on for too long. I don't think we need to make sure that all previous discussions are completely finished before we move on to a new one.

Can we get some other thoughts on the best amount of time to devote to each article before moving on to the next one?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but any data presented on the internet is free for use as long as it is referenced. Check with Greg (I believe he's the PF owner) and verify.

I don't think there would be a problem for images posted on public webpages. I'm thinking more about e.g. an image found in an online article that one needs some kind of subscription in order to access.

 

[DocToxyn]

Count me in. I would think that at least a week would be required to get all interested parties to download, read and critique the papers, so perhaps only one new title per week. The subsequent discussions would progress as far, or as long, as the subject and/or reader interest support them.

 

[hypnagogue]

Count me in. I would think that at least a week would be required to get all interested parties to download, read and critique the papers, so perhaps only one new title per week. The subsequent discussions would progress as far, or as long, as the subject and/or reader interest support them.

Yeah, this is more or less what I had in mind. Q_Goest suggests we should follow a slower pace, and cotarded seemed to imply a faster pace. Anyone else want to chime in?

Also, I'm still wondering about the legality of posting images from articles that one needs a paid or university subscription in order to access online (of course, if we did so, we would provide references and so on). Perhaps DocToxyn or Moonbear would have some good insight into this?

 

[somasimple]

Hi,

On my site, we discuss about papers but often it is accepted to share them via a protected forum (private). It works like a room where members read a paper that one of us bought.

 

[hypnagogue]

Hi,

On my site, we discuss about papers but often it is accepted to share them via a protected forum (private). It works like a room where members read a paper that one of us bought.

That sounds like a nice solution, but I'd rather have our club out in public, where everyone who might be interested can learn from the presentations and be a fly on the wall (or participate) in the discussions. If we have to sacrifice the ability to post certain things in order to do that, so be it (though of course, I would prefer if we did not have to do that).

 

[somasimple]

Hi,

I enhanced the solution with a public forum by the creation of a public group which is the only available to download protected papers. In this case, all posts are viewable by public/normal members but papers/attachments, only but members of the group.

Papers have copyrights and need to be protected. Or you need to limit them to sample issues and free full text access journals.

 

[Q_Goest]

I'd like to know if people would prefer to have the paper's author invited or not.

Thanks.

 

[neurocomp2003]

an article a month/biweekly sounds about right...just to get the club started since its almost the start of the new year...onces the club gets going you can jump to biweekly/weekly.
Exactly what fields will you be exploring in M&B club? any? strictly human intelligence from AI/Cogsci/Neurosci-human brain/Lingu/ and the other sciences
or are we talking about general intelligence like ALife, Adaptive Learning Techniques, other types of brains, evolution of the mammalian brain, self organizatino of other species like ants? etc

 

[cotarded]

I was too hasty when I last posted. I underestimated the depth of the discussions and the care with which the material will be selected. I thought it'd be more of a napster for compelling papers, with the option of exploring it further in a separate discussion left to those interested. I still think there should be someplace people can deposit papers and articles that they either don't have time to thoroughly discuss, or when the appeal to the rest of us is uncertain - a sticky, maybe? The popular items could migrate to our intensive discussions. It'd be a communal paper drop box and screening area.

As far as the focus of this thread goes, now that I better understand what we're really talking about, I completely agree that we could need quite a bit more than a week to really address everything. Though I don't think we need to bring a discourse to conclusion to begin a new one. I think biweekly would be a fine balance. We could always defer the next paper if the current discussion isn't showing signs of deceleration.

q_goest:

I'd like to know if people would prefer to have the paper's author invited or not.

Having McFadden come in on our CEMI discussions was a delight - though I wish he'd stayed a tad longer to see some of your later posts - and certainly the sort of thing that I'd like to see repeated (whenever possible). Although we should probably hold on invitations until we get deadlocked or find ourselves arguing interpretations; after all, we want to have something to attract the author. People tend to want to rectify misconceptions concerning their work; presenting your paper to people on the internet at random probably isn't quite as enticing.

edit: I really want to see johnjoe's response to moonbear's most recent connexin-36 post.

 

[cotarded]

Hi,

I enhanced the solution with a public forum by the creation of a public group which is the only available to download protected papers. In this case, all posts are viewable by public/normal members but papers/attachments, only but members of the group.

What do you all think of this idea? Sounds like a good compromise, provided matriculating to the privileged group isn't too difficult.

 

[hypnagogue]

Exactly what fields will you be exploring in M&B club? any? strictly human intelligence from AI/Cogsci/Neurosci-human brain/Lingu/ and the other sciences
or are we talking about general intelligence like ALife, Adaptive Learning Techniques, other types of brains, evolution of the mammalian brain, self organizatino of other species like ants? etc

Basically, any paper that covers a topic appropriate for posting in this forum (as explained in the sticky) would be acceptable. (I think pretty much all of the things you listed would fall under that umbrella.) This would allow for quite a wide range of topics and fields for us to explore.

 

[hypnagogue]

What do you all think of this idea? Sounds like a good compromise, provided matriculating to the privileged group isn't too difficult.

Yes, that does sound like a good solution. I'll talk to Greg to see what we can do about setting up something like that, but I'd still also like to be more assured one way or the other what would be an acceptable way to handle stuff like this (legally).

 

[hypnagogue]

I thought it'd be more of a napster for compelling papers, with the option of exploring it further in a separate discussion left to those interested. I still think there should be someplace people can deposit papers and articles that they either don't have time to thoroughly discuss, or when the appeal to the rest of us is uncertain - a sticky, maybe? The popular items could migrate to our intensive discussions. It'd be a communal paper drop box and screening area.

That sounds like a good idea. Perhaps what we could do is set up a sticky like that anyway, just for general interest purposes, and members of the club could select papers from the list to present if they so chose. I was also thinking of making a sticky for keeping tabs on news articles involving m/b stuff (independently of the journal club), so perhaps that could somehow be integrated into the journal article reference source as well.

 

[CosminaPrisma]

A Neuroscience Journal Club Sounds Great

I would be very excited to participate in a Mind and Brain Sciences Journal Club or message board. I think it would be a great experience even though I don't know much about the subject matter. I am very eager to hear more and would be delighted to participate in such a forum.

 

[somasimple]

Hi All,

Yes, that does sound like a good solution. I'll talk to Greg to see what we can do about setting up something like that, but I'd still also like to be more assured one way or the other what would be an acceptable way to handle stuff like this (legally).

It is legit and at the fringe, at the same time.

• Having a public group is a good way to advertise members about usage of protected materials. Many papers may be shared for research.
• The paper is only discussed, not sold, neither used in a malignant way.
• You get the right to buy a journal and tell some friends that the journal is at home, in a room where they could read it. It is perfectly legal.
• Institutions buy articles and they are read by teams. This is legit.
• But the paper is reproduced since it is stored on a server. It is why, it may not be accessible directly without an agreement of the group's moderator.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

I'd like to read the discussions, but I don't think I'd have anything much to contribute. Would I have to join the club in order to read the papers? And btw, I really enjoyed the links Somasimple gave to some of Domasio's papers. Hope papers like that will be included in your discussions.

 

[hypnagogue]

Just a quick note here-- due to the nearing holidays, I think it would be best to wait until a couple of weeks after New Year's to officially kick off the M&B journal club. In the meantime, we can continue to discuss relevant organizational issues about how the club will work (more to be said here, but I don't have the time right this instant), and we can also begin hunting down some articles that we can use for presentation purposes when we do get started.

 

[Moonbear]

Yeah, this is more or less what I had in mind. Q_Goest suggests we should follow a slower pace, and cotarded seemed to imply a faster pace. Anyone else want to chime in?

I think the 1-2 week per paper timeframe is reasonable. More often than that and you'll lose participants just because they don't have time to read the article, and any longer than that and the topics will drag on too long or we'll lose momentum in selecting new articles. Perhaps we could always have two topics open at the same time...one where the paper is introduced about a week in advance of planned discussion (the discussion "leader" can provide the source of the article they will discuss, and perhaps a brief intro of why they find the paper interesting), which will give everyone time to get the article and read it and think about it, and then the other topic that was started a week earlier that is being actively discussed. If the discussion continues longer, that's fine, but we'll open up the new topic to discussion in that time. We can "sticky" the active discussion and the upcoming topic, and "unstick" the previous discussion after the week is up. How does that sound?

Also, I'm still wondering about the legality of posting images from articles that one needs a paid or university subscription in order to access online (of course, if we did so, we would provide references and so on). Perhaps DocToxyn or Moonbear would have some good insight into this?

We can't post those images without permission from the journal (and my experience is the journals are reticent to grant permission without charging an exhorbitant fee...even if you're an author on the article! This came up when we wanted to include a figure in a review article that we had previously included in another publication). It's a fine line because we are using them for educational purposes, which generally is considered "fair use," but because this site is funded by contributorships and advertising, it could be viewed as using their articles to make a profit (even if Greg doesn't make any actual profit). Besides, since we can't control who views this site, a publisher would have a legitimate gripe that we're making their copyrighted material available to people who haven't paid either through an institutional or personal subscription.

What we can do is re-draw the highlights of a figure rather than copy the exact figure and provide reference to the source with a statement such as, "Based on: Author(s), Journal Title, Year, Vol: Pages." Alternatively, we can describe it in words and refer to the original source..."If you look at Fig. 1 in (article reference), you'll note that there is an increase in..."

 

[Moonbear]

I'd like to know if people would prefer to have the paper's author invited or not.
Thanks.

I'd rather not have the authors invited. For starters, this isn't even going to be feasible in most cases. Second, it really hinders discussion to have the author hanging around and having to worry about hurting their feelings when you find some fatal flaw in their reasoning.

Just a quick note here-- due to the nearing holidays, I think it would be best to wait until a couple of weeks after New Year's to officially kick off the M&B journal club. In the meantime, we can continue to discuss relevant organizational issues about how the club will work (more to be said here, but I don't have the time right this instant), and we can also begin hunting down some articles that we can use for presentation purposes when we do get started.

I agree. I wouldn't have time to seriously contribute to such discussions until after the first week of January.

Also, I think we can be somewhat flexible in how we address papers and what topics we choose. I think the person who chooses a paper should be the discussion "leader." I think they should have the role of initiating the discussion with the background on the topic, and jumping into steer the direction of discussion if necessary, and presenting their initial thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper.

Neurocomp asked about the range of topics for discussion. I think that's what interests me most about having a journal club here, that we'd have a much wider range of topics guided by member interests than what I'd get to discuss in a local journal club. Though, for that reason, we have to keep in mind that the person introducing a paper may be the ONLY person here with much background on that particular subject, so they will have to take on the responsibility of providing the necessary background for others, letting us know if a particular method is done correctly, is typical for that field, etc. We all stand to learn a lot from this approach.

For those who are expressing concern that they don't know enough about the subjects to be discussed to contribute to discussion much, feel free to just read along and see if you learn something, but also feel free to ask questions! The whole point of a journal club is for people who are not experts in a field to learn more about it, and for the experts to help them along. Questions are essential for the discussion. You might wonder about anything from how they came to a certain conclusion based on the results to why a particular reagent was used in a method. Those are all opportunities for learning.

 

[hypnagogue]

I think the 1-2 week per paper timeframe is reasonable. More often than that and you'll lose participants just because they don't have time to read the article, and any longer than that and the topics will drag on too long or we'll lose momentum in selecting new articles. Perhaps we could always have two topics open at the same time...one where the paper is introduced about a week in advance of planned discussion (the discussion "leader" can provide the source of the article they will discuss, and perhaps a brief intro of why they find the paper interesting), which will give everyone time to get the article and read it and think about it, and then the other topic that was started a week earlier that is being actively discussed. If the discussion continues longer, that's fine, but we'll open up the new topic to discussion in that time. We can "sticky" the active discussion and the upcoming topic, and "unstick" the previous discussion after the week is up. How does that sound?

The rolling scheduling idea sounds great. I think that's the best proposal yet, so unless anyone has any strong objections or alternative ideas they'd like to discuss further, I think we can go with that setup.

As for the stickying, I was actually thinking of having a journal club 'index' stickied that would have links to all current and past journal threads (and maybe a blurb about what the journal club is all about and how it works). That might mitigate any need to stick the current journal discussion itself, but we'll see how it goes.

We can't post those images without permission from the journal (and my experience is the journals are reticent to grant permission without charging an exhorbitant fee...even if you're an author on the article! This came up when we wanted to include a figure in a review article that we had previously included in another publication). It's a fine line because we are using them for educational purposes, which generally is considered "fair use," but because this site is funded by contributorships and advertising, it could be viewed as using their articles to make a profit (even if Greg doesn't make any actual profit). Besides, since we can't control who views this site, a publisher would have a legitimate gripe that we're making their copyrighted material available to people who haven't paid either through an institutional or personal subscription.

Thanks for clarifying that. I assume that only holds for figures found in online articles requiring some sort of subscription, correct? i.e. if an article is available to the public online, there should be no problems with direct linking to images, right?

As for images that would require permission, do you think somasimple's idea would do the trick? Actually, ultimately it might be preferable to just go with redrawings or descriptions of such figures, because optimally I would like everyone on PF to have the same kinds of access to whatever things we'll be talking about.

 

[hypnagogue]

Also, I think we can be somewhat flexible in how we address papers and what topics we choose. I think the person who chooses a paper should be the discussion "leader." I think they should have the role of initiating the discussion with the background on the topic, and jumping into steer the direction of discussion if necessary, and presenting their initial thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper.

Agreed, but...

Neurocomp asked about the range of topics for discussion. I think that's what interests me most about having a journal club here, that we'd have a much wider range of topics guided by member interests than what I'd get to discuss in a local journal club. Though, for that reason, we have to keep in mind that the person introducing a paper may be the ONLY person here with much background on that particular subject, so they will have to take on the responsibility of providing the necessary background for others, letting us know if a particular method is done correctly, is typical for that field, etc. We all stand to learn a lot from this approach.

What if someone would like to present an article on a subject that they don't have much background in? One could always do some preliminary, extra research to help get filled in on such things (review articles are always good), but there's a limit to how much background one could accrue that way and how well one could understand it, especially if time constraints are a factor. It would be nice if people were free to stretch their horizons a bit with this, even for the articles / topics they themselves present.

For those who are expressing concern that they don't know enough about the subjects to be discussed to contribute to discussion much, feel free to just read along and see if you learn something, but also feel free to ask questions! The whole point of a journal club is for people who are not experts in a field to learn more about it, and for the experts to help them along. Questions are essential for the discussion. You might wonder about anything from how they came to a certain conclusion based on the results to why a particular reagent was used in a method. Those are all opportunities for learning.

Yes, definitely.

 

[Moonbear]

Thanks for clarifying that. I assume that only holds for figures found in online articles requiring some sort of subscription, correct? i.e. if an article is available to the public online, there should be no problems with direct linking to images, right?

If it's freely available, and we just provide a link rather than re-posting the image, I see no problem with that.

As for images that would require permission, do you think somasimple's idea would do the trick?

I'm not really sure it would. All it does it make it a more elite group, but we'd still be providing copyrighted material to people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it. On the other hand, it would be easier to argue we're using it only for educational fair-use if access is limited to those actively participating in the discussion. It would be different if we were all at the same academic institution and were just providing a convenient copy of an article we all already had access to. Ultimately, we have to abide by US copyright laws. Things might be different for somasimple since he's in France. I don't know how much the laws vary from country to country.

Actually, ultimately it might be preferable to just go with redrawings or descriptions of such figures, because optimally I would like everyone on PF to have the same kinds of access to whatever things we'll be talking about.

Yes, I'd prefer a method that doesn't limit participation. Since most people here are trying to broaden their knowledge in areas outside their own research area, I don't see a problem if we have to limit our sources to free access journals, even if it means they have to be a year or so old. It would be different if we were trying to keep up with the cutting edge in our own fields.