open science
clock | August 18, 2008
Tell Vedran what else should be included in the RSS Feed aggregator about Open Access....
clock | August 17, 2008
Second Life and Social Media: Networking Gold Mine or Time Sink?
view presentationtags: second life networking chemistry
clock | August 13, 2008Reed Elsevier caught copying my content without my permission:
I was not asked for, and did not give, permission for my work to appear on that page, much less in that format. Needless to say, I felt a little slighted.
The website in question appears to be a custom version of the LexisNexis search engine. This particular version appears to be Elsevier's own custom version, intended for internal use. I don't have conclusive proof of that, but the title bar at the top of the page reads, "Elsevier Corporate", and the person who accessed my blog from that page had an IP address that's registered…
clock | August 13, 2008Larry Lessig reports some exciting, huge and important news: free licenses upheld:
So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge.
I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in…
clock | August 13, 2008Pushing Boundaries in Information Visualization: Using Virtual, Immersive and Interactive Technologies in Research & Practice
Saturday, September 13, 2008
9am - 4:30pm
This workshop will showcase some of the innovative uses of technology in terms of virtual and immersive environments for interacting with information. The day's events will generate attendee discussion around the use, integration and evaluation of such tools (how do we evaluate the use of these technologies? how can research improve practice? how can practice inform research, etc.).
The program will feature a colorful mix…
clock | August 12, 2008The new blog carnival, covering the way science is changing (or not changing enough) in the 21st century - Praxis, is about to start. The call for submissions is now open - send them to me at Coturnix AT gmail dot com by August 14th at midnight Eastern so I can post the carnival on the 15th in the morning.
The business of science - from getting into grad school, succeeding in it, getting a postdoc, getting a job, getting funded, getting published, getting tenure and surviving it all with some semblance of sanity - those are kinds of topics that are appropriate for this carnival, more in…
clock | August 7, 2008On Tuesday night, when I posted my personal picks from this week's crop of articles published in PLoS ONE, I omitted (due to a technical glitch on the site), to point out that a blog-friend of mine John Logsdon published his first PLoS ONE paper on that day:
It's a updated and detailed report on the ongoing work in my lab to generate and curate an "inventory" of genes involved in meiosis that are present across major eukaryotic lineages. This paper focuses on the protist, Trichomonas vaginalis, an organism not known to have a sexual phase in its life cycle.
Here is the paper (and check John's…
clock | August 5, 2008Today, I have everything I need on my computer, and so do most working scientists as well. Papers can be found online because journals are online (and more and more are Open Access). Protocols are online. Books are online. Writing and collaboration tools are online. Communication tools are online. Data collection and data analysis and data graphing and paper-writing tools are all on the computer. No need for having any paper in the office, right? Right.
But remember how new that all is. The pictures (under the fold, the t-shirt is of Acrocanthosaurus at the NC Museum of Natural…
clock | August 4, 2008Michael Shermer - Toward a Type 1 civilization. Ignore the nutty libertarianism - read only this sentence:
Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone.
clock | July 31, 2008There is a new study out there - Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial - that some people liked, but Peter Suber and Stephan Harnad describe why the study is flawed (read Harnad's entire post for more):
To show that the OA advantage is an artefact of self-selection bias (or any other factor), you first have to produce the OA advantage and then show that it is eliminated by eliminating self-selection bias (or any other artefact).
This is not what Davis et al did. They simply showed that they could detect no OA advantage one year after publication…
clock | July 31, 2008Sometimes people ask me what do I have against Green OA (repositories) as opposed to Gold OA (journals) and I have a couple of stock answers to that, usually including a caveat that I do not really have anything against Green OA per se, but the way it is implemented is not good, yet makes people complacent, which in turn slows the down the progress towards complete OA. Not well implemented? Well, yes, I have seen all of these sins over the past couple of years. Once there is a standard that all builders of repositories adher to, Green OA will be OK (though there are other arguments against…
clock | July 30, 2008Best time to appreciate Open Access? When you're really sick and want to learn more about what you have.:
* Complete OA still a long way off. One thing I re-learned during this was that it is incredibly frustrating to see how much of the biomedical literature is still not freely available online. Shame on Elsevier and all the others who are still hoarding this important information.
* Thanks to those providing OA. Related to the above issue, I came to appreciate was the societies and publishers have decided to go the OA route. I spent a lot of time reading material from ASM, BMC, PLoS…
clock | July 28, 2008Martin saw this comment of mine and sprung into action: Name the new 'Carnival of Scientific Life'!
The two big questions are what to call it, and how often to host it, so I'd like your input in the comments below please. I'll be making the final decision on August 1st.
What would be a good name for the carnival? (Ideally something without "carnival" in the title.)
Should it be held monthly, or at some other frequency?
The carnival is intended to cover all aspects of life as a scientist, whether it's the lifestyle, career progress, doing a Ph.D., getting funding, climbing the slippery pole,…
clock | July 28, 2008Citation Statistics (pdf):
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using "simple and objective" methods is increasingly prevalent today. The "simple and objective" methods are broadly interpreted as bibliometrics, that is, citation data and the statistics derived from them. There is a belief that citation statistics are inherently more accurate because they substitute simple numbers for complex judgments, and hence overcome the possible subjectivity of peer review. But this belief is…
clock | July 27, 2008Watch it here:
The Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show #053 - Open Science:
This show is all about the intersection of Technology and Human desire. This year Dave and I have been focusing on 'deepening connections' with those we subscribe to via RSS. Having a chat on a podcast is a remarkable way of doing that we have found. Agenda is loose guide only, we are very stream of consciousness, no edits, no script kinda guys.
clock | July 25, 2008Bjoern Brembs is on a roll! Check all of these out:
Incentivizing open scientific discussion:
Apart from the question of whether the perfect scientist is the one who only spends his time writing papers and doing experiments, what incentives can one think of to provide for blogging, commenting, sharing? I think because all of science relies on creativity, information and debate, the overall value of blogging, commenting and sharing can hardly be overestimated, so what incentives can there be for the individual scientist?
Journals - the dinosaurs of scientific communication:
Today's system of…
clock | July 23, 2008The complexity of sharing scientific databases:
Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it's protected until 70 years after your death. Facts, however, are another matter - they can't be copyrighted. So while trivial but creative scribblings are copyrighted, unless you choose to release them into the public domain, the information painstakingly discovered about the human genome - DNA sequences, for instance - aren't. But the containers they're stored in - the databases they're held in - can be copyrighted.
Breaking News: Open…
clock | July 19, 2008A couple of weeks ago, Vedran Vucic gave a talk about Open Access at the law school at the Belgrade University. For those of you who can read Serbian, here is the newspaper report. Glad to see PLoS mentioned...
clock | July 19, 2008Bjoern Brembs:
Today's system of scientific journals started as a way to effectively use a scarce resource, printed paper. Soon thereafter, the publishers realized there were big bucks to be made and increased the number of journals to today's approx. 24,000. Today, there is no technical reason any more why you couldn't have all the 2.5 million papers science puts out every year in a single database.
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Precurser to this publishing reform was access reform: scientific papers are the result of publicly funded research and should be publicly accessible. This reform appears now…