open science
clock | March 10, 2009In the Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship: The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing:
...This statement by Deutsche Bank is an astonishing comment on the profitability of the industry. The notion that Elsevier, and therefore the other commercial publishers, add "little value to the publishing process" and cannot justify the high profit margins is significant. This statement by Deutsche Bank, while aimed towards investors, reveals the skepticism of investment…
clock | March 7, 2009You may remember when I wrote this recently (check out the useful links within):
The Conyers bill (a.k.a. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801), is back. Despite all the debunking it got last time around, and despite the country having more important problems to deal with right now, this regressive bill, completely unchanged word-for-word, is apparently back again. It is the attempt by TA publishers, through lies and distortions, to overturn the NIH open access policy. Here are some reactions - perhaps Rep.Conyers and colleagues should get an earful from us....
Then, Lawrence Lessig…
clock | March 6, 2009Liz Allen writes today:
One snowy weekend in January 2008, I was lucky enough to attend the Science Blogging Conference (co-organized by Bora Zivkovic our Online Discussion Expert) in NC where I networked with the great and the good of the scientific communication world. PLoS distributed free T-shirts at the event and, not surprisingly, I was warmly greeted wherever I went.
In one session, I listened to a young health care worker based in a remote location expressing her frustration about how difficult it was for her to access any content because of her unreliable internet connection and I…
clock | March 6, 2009*****************************************************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Conference for Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web (ICSD2009)
September 8-11, 2009 - University of Trento, Trento (ITALY)
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Digital libraries, in the central view of the term, focus on storing and organizing digital objects and providing access to these objects through professional or user-generated metadata or content-based search (full text, image content, full musical score). In an expanded view, DLs…
clock | March 4, 2009I've been having fun lately watching this guy struggle with the 21st century realities of scientific publishing which has a lot of parallels with the struggle that journalistic curmudgeons have - too steeped in the 20th century model to have the courage to think in a new way:
Socialism in science, or why Open Access may ultimately fail:
OK. So here's the argument: Science needs to be made known through publishing. In order for science to be published, we need a team of people who will do the job of supervising the review process, editing, storing, and distributing bite-sized pieces of science…
clock | March 4, 2009From here:
Tim O'Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.
Drawing upon his real world experiences, Tim O'Reilly shares his thoughts on Open Publishing, why its a good idea, and how to make it work. This video was taken on the floor of the 2009 O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City.
For more information on Tim O'Reilly (and why he knows what he's talking about), head to oreilly.com/ or follow him at: twitter.com/timoreilly
You can read (and download) "What is Web 2.0" at:oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/…
clock | March 3, 2009John Conyers and Open Access:
Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn't like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they've adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition -- they've gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don't like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can't even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually…
clock | March 3, 2009Chris Patil and Vivian Siegel wrote the first part of their thoughts on this problem, in Drinking from the firehose of scientific publishing:
The fundamental question is this: can the wisdom of crowds be exploited to post-filter the literature?
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A lioness doesn't bother eating individual blades of grass - she lets the antelopes do that drudgery, and then she eats the antelopes. It is similarly tempting to assign the post-filtering task to hordes of enthusiastic volunteers - intrepid, pajama-clad souls, armed only with keyboards and search engines, who would wade…
clock | March 3, 2009Under the fold:
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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Harold Varmus
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin
Political HumorJoke of the Day
clock | March 2, 2009A few days back a paper came out (not OA, sorry), with a keen grasp of the obvious: Open Access is useful for those living in countries where they do not have much access. Duh! Furthermore, those who barely do any science at all, i.e., in the least developed countries, don't cite, so there is no difference between OA and TA there. And yet more, their methodology was fraught with errors galore. I am happy to report that this paper was debunked by several people already - so check them out:
Evans and Reimer greatly underestimate effect of free access
Research highlights from Dr. Obvious:…
clock | March 2, 2009A Hurdle for Health Reform: Patients and Their Doctors:
Dr. Harold Varmus, the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a former director of the National Institutes of Health, said increasing public access to the findings of medical research would be important for health care reform to succeed.
"One obvious goal is getting information out to health care practitioners about effectiveness experiments," said Dr. Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer biologist and the author of the new book "The Art and Politics of Science" (Norton). "This is going to be crucial, because…
clock | March 2, 2009...is now online.
See summaries by Caryn Shechtman, Arikia Millikan and me. Update: Also see Talia Page both on Space Cadet Girl and TalkingScience.
amillikan | February 21, 2009
Thursday, February 19 ScienceBlogger Bora Zivkovic from A Blog Around the Clock gave a presentation on open science as part of a panel discussion at Columbia University in New York City. The event, titled "Open Science: Good for Research, Good for Researchers?" was organized by the Scholarly Communication Program and also featured presentations by Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University, and Barry Canton of Gingko BioWorks and OpenWetWare.
For those who have read Bora's many posts here on ScienceBlogs promoting the open science movement, it was obvious before he even uttered a word that…
clock | February 19, 2009Mrs.Coturnix and I arrived nicely in NYC last night and had a nice dinner at Heartland Brewery. This morning, we had breakfast at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where I ordered my pastry using a Serbian name for the cake, and the Albanian woman working in the Hungarian shop understood what I wanted! I forgot to bring my camera with me today, and Mrs.Coturnix did not bring her cable, so the pictures of the pastries will have to wait our return home.
Then, Mrs.Coturnix went for a long walk (it was nice in the morning, got cold in the afternoon), ending up in the Met. I joined my co-panelists Jean-…
clock | February 17, 2009The Open Science panel is this Thursday at 3-5pm.
If you miss that, or even if you don't, come and meet me and other local bloggers, scientists and onlookers on Friday at Old Town Bar on 45 East 18th Street at 8pm.
clock | February 16, 2009Mrs.Coturnix and I will be in NYCity this week. My main business is the Open Science panel at Columbia on Thursday afternoon, which I hope you can attend.
For a more informal way to meet, let's gather at Old Town bar near Union Square at 8pm on Friday night. Tell your friends! And I hope to see you soon.
clock | February 15, 2009Being quite busy lately, I accumulated a lot of links to stuff I wanted to comment on but never found time. Well, it does not appear I will find time any time soon, so here are the links for you to comment on anyway (just because I link to them does not mean I agree with them - in some cases quite the opposite):
In Defense of Secrecy :
Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable. One of the first official communications issued by the new…
clock | February 11, 2009You may remember some time ago, we gave out the data to a few people in the community to take a look at the commenting function on PLoS ONE. Now, Euan Adie, using crowdsourcing (a big Thank You to 818 people who helped with this project) came up with the most detailed analysis to date. Well worth your time to take a look.