M&B Journal Club?

hypnagogue

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:
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

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

hypnagogue

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

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

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

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,

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

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?

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 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.

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 in to 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

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.

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

Agreed, but...

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.

Yes, definitely.