open science
clock | February 12, 2008In today's NYTimes: At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web:
Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.
Although the outcome of Tuesday's vote would apply only to Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university's prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at…
clock | February 7, 2008Apophenia, danah boyd's blog, is one of the first blogs I ever discovered back in the depths of Time, certainly the first non-political blog, even before I found any science blogs. We finally got to meet last year at the ASIS&T meeting in Wisconsin. She just published a paper and, in her last post wows never to publish in Closed Access again. Then she gives a list of bullet points about what to do - see if you recognize yourself in one of them.
clock | February 5, 2008There were already two Science Foo Camps (in summers of 2006 and 2007) and two Science Blogging Conferences (in winters of 2007 and 2008).
But the hunger for such meetings is far from satiated. So, if you have time and money and can travel, you can choose to attend the SciBarCamp on March 15-16, 2008, where Eva is one of the organizers and Larry will be there.
Or you can go to the International Science Media Fair in Trieste on April 16-20, 2008. I'll be there, on two panels, one about Open Access, another on Science Blogging.
Or, a little later, you can attend the World Science Festival…
clock | February 5, 2008Open Students is a new blog for students about open access to research. It is run by Gavin Baker (who also recently joined Peter Suber at Open Access News - Congratulations!) and sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, as part of its student outreach activities.
The blog will cover the issues of Open Science as it affects the college students and will have frequent guest-bloggers (students, librarians, researchers, publishers...) - of which you can be one if you contact Gavin.
clock | February 4, 2008Shirley of One Big Lab blog is trying to submit a proposal for an Open Science session to be held at the next Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. Although the meeting is a whole year away, the deadline for proposals is only 4 days away. You can read the rules for proposals here and see what Shirley has written so far. With only four days to go, Shirley needs some help in finalizing the proposal and in writing letters to the organizers showing interest in such a session. All the information is here so, if you are interested, please help.
clock | January 31, 2008Aetosaurs. No, I have not heard of them until now. But that does not matter - the big story about them today is the possibility - not 100% demonstrated yet, to be fair - that some unethical things surround their discovery and naming. And not just Aetosaurs. Some other fossils as well.
As I am not on the inside loop of the story, you need to first read the background story on Aetosaurs by Darren Naish - Part 1 and Part 2.
Then, carefully read Darren's today's post and responses by Laelaps, Cryptomundo and Paleochick.
For the ethical side of the story, read Janet's take.
For the gory…
clock | January 25, 2008Here is a video of SPARC-ACRL Forum '08 on 12 January, 2008 at the Pennyslvania Convention Center in Philadelphia:
The SPARC-ACRL Forum at ALA '08 entitled "Working with the Facebook generation: Engaging students views on access to scholarship." Panelists discuss the merits of student activism, patent reform, blogs as a communication medium for scientists, and students as active members of a discussion about the right to access information for scholarly work. Features Andre Brown, Nelson Pavlosky, Stephanie Wang, and Kimberly Douglas as panelists.
Pay particular attention to Andre Brown and…
clock | January 23, 2008Dave and Co. have been working hard over the past few months and now (actually on Saturday at the Conference) Dave announces that ResearchBlogging.org is live and in action! The BPR3 site, where the entire initiative was hashed out and built will continue to serve as the News Blog.
So, register your blog. Whenever you write a post about a peer-reviewed paper, put in the icon (if you want - you can make it invisible) and go to the RB site to resolve the DOI of the paper so it shows up in your post as a proper reference. Shortly after you publish the post, the link will show up on the…
clock | January 23, 2008On the heels of David Warlick's session on using online tools in the science classroom and the student blogging panel comes the announcement that SPARC has declared the winners of the first SPARKY Awards for student-generated videos on the theme of openess of information. The winner is Habib Yazdi, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the video entitled "Share." The three winning videos are under the fold:
clock | January 22, 2008On the heels of David Warlick's session on using online tools in the science classroom, this initiative is really exciting:
Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materials Online
Cape Town, January 22nd, 2008--A coalition of educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet.
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching…
clock | January 22, 2008From Sage Ross, via John Lynch come exciting news about a new Open Access Journal - Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science
Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. The journal aims to establish a platform for interdisciplinary discussion and debate about issues that concern the community of scholars in HPS and related fields.
Apart from selecting peer reviewed articles, the journal encourages a direct dialogue…
clock | January 22, 2008The Science Communication Consortium presents:
DISCUSSION ON THE ROLES OF EMERGING MEDIA OUTLETS IN COMMUNICATING SCIENCE
Thursday, JAN 31st, 7-8:30pm
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, East Building Seminar Room (1425 Madison Ave at 98th St, NYC)
A discussion of how science is communicated effectively - and ineffectively - through emerging media outlets, such as blogging, podcasts, online multimedia, and more.
Blogs, podcasts, and other new media outlets have changed the way people learn about scientific info, and shortened the shelf life of these stories. This immediacy of information…
clock | January 21, 2008UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) Workshop - February 4th 2008:
Few people would argue that good communication is the lifeblood of good science - and the Web is opening up a whole new world of possibilities.
UK PubMed Central is ideally placed to make the best use of new Web technologies and new ideas in semantics and text mining and so to facilitate sharing of the biomedical and health research literature.
We are entering the next stage of developing UKPMC into an innovative and useful resource for UK researchers. We want to ensure that your needs and ideas are heard and incorporated at the outset…
clock | January 10, 2008M. Mitchell Waldrop (author of the delightful book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos) interviewed me and a bunch of others back in August about the changing ways of science communication. I completely forgot about it, but was reminded yesterday when he e-mailed me to say that the draft of the article is now online on the Scientific American site: Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?
The idea is that the draft will be improved by commentary by readers - and sure enough, there are already 19 comments there - before it goes to print in a future issue of the…
clock | January 8, 2008PLoS ONE is the first and (so far) the most successful scientific journal specifically geared to meet the brave new world of the future. After starting it and bringing it up from birth to where it is now one year later, Chris Surridge has decided to move on.
Do you think you have the skill and experience to pick up where he leaves off? Do you want to be at the cutting edge of scientific publishing? If so, take a look at the new job ad for the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE:
The overall responsibility of this position, which will be located in the San Francisco office, is to lead the…
clock | December 28, 2007In the wake of the signed omnibus bill that funds NIH and ensures open deposition of NIH-funded research, here are some thoughtful questions:
Why the NIH bill does not require copyright violation:
The great advantage of the requirement to deposit in Pubmed (rather than simply to expose on a publisher or other website) is that the act is clear. You can't "half-deposit" in Pubmed. They have the resources to decide whether any copyright statement allows the appropriate use of the information or is suffiently restrrictive that it does not meet the NIH rules.
At some stage the community will get…
clock | December 27, 2007Yesterday, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764) which, among else, mandates the repository of all NIH-funded research into PubMedCentral within at most 12 months after publication.
Until now, the placement of NIH-funded research papers into publicly accessible repositories was not mandated, but recommended. However, only about 5% of the authors actually did it, as the process was complex and not always clear. This number is growing, but far too slowly. From now on, authors will have clear guidelines and assistance in making sure that all the…
clock | December 20, 2007I buried this among a bunch of other cool links yesterday, but there was a study the other day, in the Journal of Cell Biology, that seriously calls in question the methodology used by Thompson Scientific to calculate the sacred Impact Factor, the magic number that makes and breaks lives and careers of scientists.
Apparently, it is really a magic number calculated in a mysterious way, not in the way that Thompson Scientific claims they do it. Who knows what subjective factors they include that they do not tell us about?
When we examined the data in the Thomson Scientific database, two…
clock | December 7, 2007Subscription-supported journals are like the qwerty keyboard:
Are there solutions? One reason for optimism is that changing how we pay the costs of disseminating research is not an all-or-nothing change like switching from qwerty to Dvorak keyboards. Some new open-access journals are very prestigious. Granting agencies are giving strong 'in-principle' support to open access publishing, and my last grant proposal's budget included a hefty amount for open-access publication charges. And libraries are looking for ways to escape the burden of subscription charges.
This is an interesting idea: an…
clock | December 7, 2007How to move an article from TA to OA? It does not even have to be from a peer-reviewed journal. Graham Steel explains: he contacted the author and asked him to deposit the article into an open repository. So, now you can read it either here (and pay) or here (for free).