open science
clock | May 8, 2008The latest issue of Epidemiology features a (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek) article by Miguel A. Hernan: Epidemiologists (of All People) Should Question Journal Impact Factors. Well worth reading and thinking about:
Developing a good impact factor is a nontrivial methodologic undertaking that depends on the intended goal of the rankings. Hence, a scientific discussion about any impact factor requires that its goal is made explicit and its methodology is described in enough detail to make the calculations reproducible. Paradoxically, the methodology of the impact factor that is used to…
clock | May 7, 2008Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki that contains all the information one may need and want in regard to Open Access Publishing, from jobs to research questions. You should bookmark it and check it out regularly.
clock | May 7, 2008Peter Suber relays the announcement (and add some more) of the Open Humanities Press, a collection of seven Open Access journals (a humanities PLoS of sorts) in critical and cultural theory.
Humanities bloggers have been way ahead of science bloggers in regards to posting their own work (including ideas, hypotheses and rough drafts) online, yet official humanities publishing has lagged behind natural sciences and medicine when it comes to adopting Open Access, so this is a very positive move on their part.
clock | April 27, 2008UNESCO recently published and informative book: Open access to knowledge and information: scholarly literature and digital library initiatives; the South Asian scenario, which, from what I can see, can be easily modified for all other geographic areas as well. Perhaps it can be used as a template for publishing similar booklets for Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc.
clock | April 23, 2008OK, I posted a lot of pictures of Belgrade and my Mom's food so far, but the real business was on Tuesday, when I gave two talks about Open Access, PLoS, Science 2.0, the future of the scientific paper, Open Notebook Science and science blogging.
In the morning, I gave a talk in the gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art in front of about 20 people, mostly specialist librarians. That session was recorded and, as soon as the podcast is available, I will link to it. There were many good questions asked at the end and the excitement was palpable.
Afterwards I gave an interview for Radio…
clock | April 23, 2008Sheril Kirshenbaum will be on a panel on Science and the New Media at the AAAS Forum On Science And Technology Policy on May 9th and, as bloggers tend to do, she is asking for questions, comments and ideas from the readers. If you have some thoughts on the topic - science on the Web, etc., - go and join the discussion in the comments there.
clock | April 22, 2008I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the other social networking sites like Twitter - there are only so many hours in the day.
But I am interested in possible ways of making science communication more interactive and more Webby 2.0, beyond just blogs. Pedro, Carl and Phillip have recently written thoughtful posts about this topic as well.…
clock | April 21, 2008Do you remember when Mitch Waldrop wrote a draft of an article about Science 2.0 and asked for community feedback? He got 125 comments. Using them, he has now finalized the text and it appears in today's edition of Scientific American: Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future? Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk?
clock | April 20, 2008The podcast of the radio interview with Derek Law and me about Open Access is now available online. Most of the show is in Italian, but if you cannot understand it, our interview is in English and it starts at the 22:07 minute point.
clock | April 20, 2008Yup, as soon as I land in Belgrade, I will be giving two lectures about Open Access and the Science Communication in the Age of Internet. The first one, this Tuesday at 11am, will be in the beautiful hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, sponsored by the Serbian Museum Association and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The main target audience are librarians, but I gather that the lecture is open and quite heavily advertised.
The second lecture will be on the same day at 2pm in the Decanate of the Medical school at the University of Belgrade, geared more towards the…
clock | April 17, 2008Peter Suber wrote the most clear, brief and to-the-point explanation of the new law (PDF). Worth reading and bookmarking. Along with the explanation of how it works, Peter also provided this handy table of myths about the new law that some of the dinosaur publishers are trying to push - save it, print it out and have it in your pocket when you go to meetings:
clock | April 11, 2008Niyaz Ahmed did some stats on the Faculty of 1000 and came up with some interesting data:
I did some analyses involving tools at F1000Biology to know how inclined are the opinion leaders in biological sciences about PLoSONE articles given that the Faculty Members of F1000 have been traditionally 'jumping' to articles from a few top tier journals such as Nature or Cell. Good to say, the trend is reversing, although slow.
Here is how - I was very much pleased to note PLoS ONE's visible impact; 55 of the1241 articles (4%) published in PLoS ONE in 2007 have been evaluated and recommended by the…
clock | April 10, 2008Tomorrow at noon, tune into NPR's Science Friday, as you do every week anyway, I know, and you do not need to be told by me, but this time, make sure you hear Harold Varmus being interviewed about the implementation of the new NIH law and the editorial he wrote in PLoS Biology.
If I remember correctly, NPR Science Friday posts podcasts of the shows a few hours after they air live, so if you miss the show in real time you can come back to it and hear it later.
clock | April 8, 2008A post from December 5, 2007:
Communication
Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and…
clock | April 8, 2008As many of you may be aware, yesterday was the first day of the implementation of the new NIH law which requires all articles describing research funded by NIH to be deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. Folks at SPARC have put together a list of resources one can consult when looking for answers about the implementation of the access policy.
Bloggers on Nature Network as well as here on Scienceblogs.com will write posts about the NIH bill and its implementation throughout the week (the 'OA week'), informing their readers about the implementation, the next steps to be…
clock | April 7, 2008Bee and Michael and Chad and Eva and Timo and Cameron will be there. And so will I. And many other interesting people. Where? At the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute (Waterloo, Ontario) on Sep. 8th-12th 2008. And it will be fun. This is the blurb of the meeting:
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these…
clock | April 6, 2008About a month ago, Karen of The Beagle Project published a nifty paper in PLoS ONE. Now she wrote a blog post with the background story, the 'tacit knowledge' that usually does not appear in peer-reviewed literature but is essential for the workings of science - the kind of stuff that is transferred vertically from advisors to students, or horizontally between researchers at conferences.
It is important at this day and age for this tacit knowledge to become public. By hogging it, researchers in big institutions in developed countries hamper the development of scientists in small places…
clock | April 5, 2008You must have noticed that there wasn't too much effort on this blog over the past couple of weeks (except for the elaborate and too successful April Fools hoax). I've just been so busy lately. So, here is a quick recap, and some pictures.
Back on March 21, I went to Duke University to participate in a panel called Shaping the world, one job at a time: An altruistic/alternative career panel. From education, to public health in the developing world, to science journalism, writing, blogging and publishing. The room was full (80 people? Perhaps 100?!). I am not sure one hour was enough for…
clock | March 25, 2008Scared publishers ask for a hearing and get an earful:
Librarians and educators, meanwhile, strongly defended the NIH policy-and spoke of the lengthy process of consideration it has already gone through, urging that implementation now proceed as planned. In its comments, SPARC reiterated that all stakeholders have had ample time to consider the policy dating back to 2004. SPARC said that it has, along with many other stakeholders, created "several programs to help to pave the way for the smooth implementation of the revised policy," including a range of educational initiatives and practical…
clock | March 25, 2008From the Library Journal:
The Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) pioneered the nation's first consortial online catalog back in the 1980s, and this week, took that legacy a step further with the launch of "Search TRLN", which officials say adds "next-generation search capabilities" to the consortium's combined collection of 16 million volumes. Search TRLN, is a new single-interface discovery tool, enabling users to search across the entire collections of the four member institutions: Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and the…