open science
clock | September 26, 2007Back in July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires all the NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public within at most 12 months subsequent to publication.
The equivalent bill has passed the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this summer and will be up for vote in the Senate very soon! In advance of this important vote, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a Call for action:
As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access…
clock | September 20, 2007Jim Giles, New Scientist contributor, got the memo and wrote a blog post and an article about it. You can read the actual memo here (pdf) to see what Dezenhall advised the dinosaur publishers to do to stave off the inevitable move to Open Access. So now you can see where PRISM comes from.
clock | September 14, 2007In the news today, I received a link to this press release:
Open education resource site HippoCampus launches:
The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education has launched an interactive homework help Web site funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Monterey-based institution said late Thursday that open education resource site HippoCampus provides comprehensive high school, advanced placement, and college general education course content.
You can now go to the HippoCampus site and test it out and start using it.
clock | September 4, 2007Two excellent articles about Open Access and the future of scientific publishing appeared today: The irony of a web without science by James Boyle in Financial Times, and Next-Generation Implications of Open Access by Paul Ginsparg in CTWatch. Obligatory Readings of the Day.
clock | September 3, 2007Sundar Raman at the Internet radio station KRUU.100.1FM has uploaded a series of interviews (from 3rd October 2006 till 21st August 2007), all on the topic of openness and transparency - from Open Source, through Open Book and Open Access, to Open Society. This series of interviews is entitled 'Open Views' and a total of 37 can be downloaded here. Well worth your time!
clock | August 31, 2007As you may have heard, the public rollout of SciVee was inadvertent and premature - seen by everyone at the time there were only one or two movies up and not all the capabilities in place yet. It is nice to hear that more functionalities are about to go up later today:
In response to all your great feedback and requests, we are rolling out several new features starting this afternoon. We apologize because our site will be temporarily down for about a day. We appreciate your patience and hope you enjoy the new features on your next visit. The new features that you can expect to see include:…
clock | August 26, 2007When technological or social changes start altering the business landscape in a particular industry, people involved in that business tend to respond in three general ways.
The visionaries immediately see where their world is going, jump to the front edge of it and make sure that the change is as swift and painless as possible, resulting in as good new business environment as possible. They immediately sell their horses and invest in the development of the internal combustion engine, gear-boxes, brakes and start building car factories.
The followers are much more timid, but they are astute…
clock | August 22, 2007Do you remember all the buzz about the paper on the not random but not deterministic either behavior in fruitflies? By our blogfriend Bjoern Brembs?
Well, you can now watch the behavior of the insect in the movie associated with the paper. The video is up on SciVee of course - see it here.
And if there is a text box on top of it that bothers you, you can easily toggle it off - see the menu on the left, find Selection and click on the selection you are watching - textbox is gone. Click again, box is back. Also there on the left are Options, one of which includes "disable selection box",…
clock | August 21, 2007I have discovered that I sometimes suffer from paralysis by analysis on the blog. I write the best stuff when I concoct a post in my head during a dog walk and then immediately pour it into the computer while it is still hot. Whenever I set out to do some real lit research on the topic I realize that other, smarter people have already written all that, and did a better job than I could ever dream of doing, so I abandon the post.
So, I am getting really nervous now, as I am thinking of writing a post about the history of the scientific paper and how the Web and the Open Access will change…
clock | August 20, 2007Video is taking over science communication. And why not? Now that paper is outdated, the limitations of that ancient technology should not apply to scientific publishing any more. Just because paper cannot support movies does not mean that modern scientific papers should shy away from using them.
Last week saw the launch of SciVee, essentially an aggregator of science movies. Now, you may ask - why do we need yet another one of those sites? There are several out there already. Journal of Visualized Experiments is a real journal - the videos are submitted and reviewed first and, if…
clock | August 15, 2007Just had coffee with Emile Petrone, the developer of Knowble, a social networking site for scientists (and yes, this includes social scientists as well). The site is already open if you want to join and look around (find me and ping me), but watch this space for future information - there will be a big official rollout soon and I will provide more information at that time.
clock | August 12, 2007Checking out hundreds of pictures from Scifoo that people have uploaded on Flickr and their blogs, I found a couple of more that have me in them:
In this one, I explain to Greg Bear that Open Access is not Science Fiction any more:
[Photo: Simon Quellen Field]
In this one, I tell Sara Abdulla (of Nature) how nice it is to work for an Open Access publisher:
[Photo: Jacqueline Floyd]
And in this one, I stand on a street corner in the middle of Googleplex, preaching Open Access to whoever will listen (perhaps I should grow a long beard, wear a toga and some sandals, and get Jack Chick to…
clock | August 12, 2007Lisa Junker of Associations Now interviewed Patrick Brown, one of the founders of the Public Library of Science:
Into the Great Wide Open
A very clear explanation of what Open Access is all about. Obligatory Reading of the Day.
(Via via)
Want it shorter? Here is a five-liner by Jonathan Eisen.
clock | August 9, 2007As I predicted, bloggers have waited a day or two before they wrote much of substance abour Scifoo. First, you don't want to miss out on any cool conversations by blogging instead. Second, the experience is so intense, one needs to cool down, process and digest everything. Before I write my own thoughts, here are some links to places where you can see what others are doing:
The campers are joining the Science Foo Camp Facebook group (honor system - only campers are supposed to join, but it is open) and exchanging links, pictures and information.
There is an official aggregator where you can…
clock | August 8, 2007Gavin has an interesting take on it:
I've long believed that there are parallels between the global campaign for open access to the biomedical literature and the campaign for access to essential medicines.
For a start, both information and medicines can promote health and save lives. Indeed the late James Grant, former executive director of Unicef, argued that, "the most urgent task before us is to get medical and health knowledge to those most in need of that knowledge. Of the approximately 50 million people who were dying each year in the late 1980s, fully two thirds could have been saved…
clock | August 3, 2007A month has passed.
It was a steep learning curve, but I think I have climbed high enough on it to be confident that I'll be fine on my own back in Chapel Hill. Being a part of the PLoS team is such an exhillarating experience - there is so much energy and optimism around the office, everybody from CEO to the newest intern living, breathing and dreaming Open Access 24/7.
Not to bore you about the job any more - you will be hearing about PLoS over and over again here - let me, for now, just show you some pictures (under the fold) from the farewell party last night at Jupiter in downtown…
clock | July 31, 2007The Demise of Old-Fashioned Scholarly Journals? (I love the photo on the top of the article!)
Thoughts about the sea of information
Open Science like the start of Apple?
Nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that.
Reading Journals Can Seriously Damage Your Wallet
Hybrid journals and the transition to OA
Oxford open access experiments
Oxford: Traditional Publisher Illustrates Leadership in Transition to Open Access
Transitioning to open access series
Course check: A conversation with three open access publishers about the challenges of sustainability
clock | July 28, 2007Why do conferences all tend to happen at the same time, hogging a couple of weekends per year, with vast chasms of free time in-between?
So, next weekend, there is going to be a lot of science content, including a science blogging session at YearlyKos. You'll be able to meet Tara, Chris, Sean, Ed, Karmen and Lindsay there, among many others.
At the exactly the same time, Alex, PZ and I (and many others who have not made their participation public yet) will be at Science Foo Camp, down at Google campus in Montain View (no link as the site is not open for public yet). That was not an easy…