open science
clock | June 20, 2008New issue of the Italian Journal of Science Communication is out with some excellent articles (some translated or abstracted from Italian, all in English):
Cultural determinants in the perception of science:
Those studying the public understanding of science and risk perception have held it clear for long: the relation between information and judgment elaboration is not a linear one at all. Among the reasons behind it, on the one hand, data never are totally "bare" and culturally neutral; on the other hand, in formulating a judgment having some value, the analytic component intertwines -…
clock | June 19, 2008As making historical papers OA is something I am very interested in, I am watching with great interest, as Jonathan Eisen attempts to make all of his father's scientific publications freely available. I think we will learn a lot from his experience about copyright, fuzzy laws, attitudes of different publishers, etc., and can use that knowledge to help more old papers see the light of day online for everyone to see, read and use.
clock | June 18, 2008If anyone is interested, Thompson has just released the new Impact Factors for scientific journals. Mark Patterson takes a look at IFs for PLoS journals and puts them in cool-headed perspective.
One day, hopefully very soon, this will not be news. What I mean by it is that there soon will be better metrics - ways to evaluate individual articles and individual people in way that is transparent and useful and, hopefully, helps treat the "CNS Disease". Journals will probably have their own metrics based on the value they add, but those metrics will not affect individual researchers' careers…
clock | June 12, 2008An interesting discussion on Slashdot (you may need to log in to see all the comments).
clock | June 12, 2008Check this out on the Science Commons blog:
Science Commons' mission is to speed the translation of basic research to useful discoveries, and we believe that a new approach is necessary to find more cures, faster. Today, we're opening up the Health Commons, a project aimed at bringing the same efficiencies to human health that the network brought to commerce and culture.
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The Health Commons proposes a different approach: enabling more companies, foundations, laboratories or even individuals to conduct research on disease targets efficiently, by providing better access…
clock | June 9, 2008For the same reason snakes have no legs. Or perhaps not. It is difficult to find out.
clock | June 6, 2008If you are looking for a short, easy-to-understand statement that gets absolutely everything about Open Access completely wrong, you can't do much better than this: Hidden cost of open access in Times Higher Education. Luckily, the commenters set it straight. So does Peter Suber, who also adds an important point:
The success of the OA movement means that every day newcomers hear about it for the first time. One of the burdens of that success is that many newcomers pick up and spread old myths about it. If Altbach isn't new to OA issues, then he's inexcusably careless with them, and his…
clock | June 5, 2008Recent discussions about potential use of downloads in place of other bibliometric measures (including Impact Factor) made us think. So, we took a look at PLoS ONE stats to see which papers are the most visited to date. The results are here - the most visited ONE paper is Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi, which got quite a lot of coverage in the media and on blogs (including BoingBoing, Slashdot, Rhosgobel, to point to just a few) when it first came out a year ago.
In second place is Paul Sereno's Structural Extremes…
clock | June 2, 2008Go to http://www.slideworld.org, type in a keyword, and it will do a search of slideshows that contain that word. I typed "circadian" and found a lot....
Hat-tip: Ana
clock | June 2, 2008Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics has devoted an entire issue to the question of the use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance. All articles are Open Access. I'd like to see the responses on blogs - let me know if you write/read one, please.
Peter does the first one.
clock | June 2, 2008Peter Suber goes philosophical:
Open access and the self-correction of knowledge:
Here's an epistemological argument for OA. It's not particularly new or novel. In fact, I trace it back to some arguments by John Stuart Mill in 1859. Nor is it very subtle or complicated. But it's important in its own right and it's importantly different from the moral and pragmatic arguments for OA we see more often.
The thesis in a nutshell is that OA facilitates the testing and validation of knowledge claims. OA enhances the process by which science is self-correcting. OA improves the reliability of…
clock | June 1, 2008More and more societies are compiling their 'classical' papers.
Here is another one.
And here I wrote, among else:
"In discussions of Open Access, we always focus on brand new papers and how to make them freely available for readers around the world as well as for people who want to mine and reanalyse the data using robots. But we almost never discuss the need to make the old stuff available. Yet we often lament that nobody reads or cites anything older than five years. Spending several years reading everything published in the field in the 20th century up until about 1995 (as well as some…
clock | May 27, 2008It seems everyone is talking about social networking sites these days. There are interesting thoughts on Richard Grant's and David Crotty's blogs (read the comment threads as well). Many of those sites will die, others will adapt, but most, I think, will play a supporting role in a whole network of services surrounding...the actual scientific papers. For instance, surrounding TOPAZ-based PLoS papers, perhaps organized into Hubs. And papers from other journals that join into the system. Thoughts?
clock | May 25, 2008A couple of days have passed and I had a lot of work-related stuff to catch up with, but I thought I better write a recap now while the iron is still hot and I remember it all. Here we go....
Surprise #1 Last time I went to a SRBR meeting (or for that matter any scientific meeting) was in 2002. I started my first blog in 2004. I started writing about science, specifically about Chronobiology, in January of 2005.
Before last week's meeting I knew of one chronobiologist who reads my blog regularly. I knew of one other chronobiologist who contacted me to ask to use some of the material for…
clock | May 23, 2008Jean-Claude Bradley and I first met at the First Science Blogging Conference where he led a session on Open Science. We then met at SciFoo and later joined forces on a panel at the ASIS&T meeting and finally met again at the second Science Blogging Conference back in January where Jean-Claude co-moderated a session on Making Data Public. Jean-Claude is famous for being the pioneer of the Open Notebook Science movement. He started posting his daily lab activity and results on his blog Useful Chemistry. Soon, he attracted a lot of feedback and subsequently some excellent collaborators…
clock | May 23, 2008There is Nature Network, there is Jeff's Bench, there is Facebook Scibook, Knowble.com is dead, and people are still building new social networking sites aimed at scientists. There is now SciLink (thanks Alex) and now also ResearchGATE (thanks Bertalan). I am joining everything and watching....one of these days, one of these will win. Nobody can guess which one (or perhaps more than one), but perhaps you can tell me which ones you like and dislike and why?
clock | May 15, 2008Social networking meets social conscience:
As reported today in the science journal Nature, MalariaEngage.org aims to help in the stuggle against malaria. Rather than throwing buckets of money at big name Western research institutes, the new website aims to give smaller locally-based African projects a bigger profile.
Relying on grass-roots support from people who are concerned about poverty and disease, the website hopes to fund in-country research that would otherwise be overlooked by the big funders such as the Gates Foundation or NIH.
The site provides profiles of projects that…
clock | May 13, 2008One of the latest additions (just two days ago, I think) to the Directory of Open Access Journals is a journal that will be of interest to some of my readers - The Open Sleep Journal. The first volume has been published and contains several interesting articles. One that drew my attention is The Phylogeny of Sleep Database: A New Resource for Sleep Scientists (PDF download) by Patrick McNamara, Isabella Capellini, Erica Harris, Charles L. Nunn, Robert A. Barton and Brian Preston. It describes how they built a database that contains information about sleep patterns in 127 mammalian species…
clock | May 12, 2008Open Access to Scholarly Publications (Updated May 10, 2008) from Sean Kass on Vimeo.
by Sean Kass (Via).
clock | May 8, 2008Recordings from the Open Access panel in Trieste are now available online. The order was a little different - I went last.