open science
clock | April 17, 2009In today's PLoS Computational Biology: Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article:
Scientific innovation depends on finding, integrating, and re-using the products of previous research. Here we explore how recent developments in Web technology, particularly those related to the publication of data and metadata, might assist that process by providing semantic enhancements to journal articles within the mainstream process of scholarly journal publishing. We exemplify this by describing semantic enhancements we have made to a recent biomedical…
clock | April 2, 2009
Look what came in the mail yesterday! The Art and Politics of Science by Harold Varmus and, since he is in some way my boss, with a very nice personal inscription inside the cover. I am excited and already started reading it.
And speaking o Varmus, he seems to be everywhere. See this article in TimesOnline:
A major investment in fighting tropical infections and chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes in poor countries would transform international perceptions of the US, according to Harold Varmus, who co-chairs the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
In an…
clock | April 2, 2009Peter Suber: A field guide to misunderstandings about open access:
The woods are full of misunderstandings about OA. They thrive in almost every habitat, and the population soars whenever a major institution adopts an OA policy. Contact between new developments and new observers who haven't followed the annual migrations always results in a colorful boomlet of young misunderstandings.
Some of these misunderstandings are mistaken for one another, especially in the flurry of activity, because of their similar markings and habitat. Some are mistaken for understanding by novices unfamiliar…
clock | March 30, 2009This is today:
A Conversation with Dr. Oliver Smithies
Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
2007 Nobel Laureate
Moderated by Dr. Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development
Monday, March 30, 2009
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Room 527
Health Sciences Library
Light refreshments to follow
Join us for a chat with Dr. Oliver Smithies about the importance of information access to scientific research, especially his own. Audience participation will be encouraged. Don't miss this opportunity to have your questions answered by Dr. Smithies. You may also submit…
clock | March 27, 2009If you write blog posts about PLoS ONE papers, you are eligible for a prize every month! I explain in some detail here, but this is the main point:
...every month, I will read all the blog coverage aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org and pick a blog post that, in my opinion, showcases the best coverage of a PLoS ONE article. I know, there is no way to quantify the "quality" of writing, so my picks will be personal. I will be looking for the posts that do the best job at connecting the center of the [science publishing] ecosystem - the paper - to the outside world. I will announce the winner…
clock | March 24, 2009EveryONE? What's that? It is the new PLoS ONE community blog:
Why a blog and why now? As of March 2009, PLoS ONE, the peer-reviewed open-access journal for all scientific and medical research, has published over 5,000 articles, representing the work of over 30,000 authors and co-authors, and receives over 160,000 unique visitors per month. That's a good sized online community and we thought it was about time that you had a blog to call your own. This blog is for authors who have published with us and for users who haven't and it contains something for everyone.
Just launched, this blog will…
clock | March 23, 2009Take a look at this picture:
It shows the top five journals ordered by the numbers of papers that Mendeley users decided are worth keeping for future reference. The discussion of the meaning of these numbers is here. I sure like that #5 there....
clock | March 19, 2009Peter Suber reports:
The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise…
clock | March 16, 2009Big, big congratulations to Dorothea Salo for getting the richly deserved Advocates-Movers & Shakers 2009 award!!!
As digital repository librarian at the UW-Madison Library, all Dorothea Salo's computer knowledge is self-taught, leading to a "rough and ready" approach to making things work. Steve Lawson, humanities librarian, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, says that Salo's "exhortation to just 'beat things with rocks until they work' has been a source of much inspiration for me."
That same relentlessness extends to Salo's pet cause, open access. "Dorothea is the Cassandra of open…
clock | March 15, 2009Daniel Lemire asks this question when observing a fallacy voiced in an editorial:
.....only a small fraction of the top 100 papers ranked by the number of citations (17 of 100) were published by single authors.....a published paper resulting from collaborative work has a higher chance of attracting more citations.
You can discuss the fallacy if you want, but I am much more interested in the next question that Daniel asks - are solo authors and groups of authors inherently attracted to different kinds of problems, or if solo vs. group dynamics make some projects more conducive for solo work…
clock | March 15, 2009Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship: The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing:
Abstract: "Academic libraries cannot pay the regularly escalating subscription prices for scholarly journals. These libraries face a crisis that has continued for many years revealing a commercial system that supports a business model that has become unsustainable. This paper examines the "serials crisis," as it has come to be known, and the economics of the academic journal…
clock | March 14, 2009Science Depends on the Diffusion of Knowledge:
According to the National Science Foundation, there are over 2.5 million research workers worldwide, with more than 1.2 million in the U.S. alone.1 If we look at all the articles, reports, emails and conversations that pass between them, we could count billions of knowledge transactions every year. This incredible diffusion of knowledge is the very fabric of science.
Given that the diffusion of knowledge is central to science, it behooves us to see if we can accelerate it. We note that diffusion takes time. Sometimes it takes a long time. Every…
clock | March 14, 2009
Help scientists track plant and animal cycles:
The USA-National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) -- a University of Arizona, Tucson-based group of scientists and citizens that monitors the seasonal cycles of plants and animals -- is calling for volunteers to help track the effect of climate change on the environment.
The group is launching a national program encouraging citizen volunteers to observe seasonal changes among plants and animals, like flowering, migration and egg-laying. They can then log in and record their observations online at the USA-NPN website.
"The program is designed for…
clock | March 14, 2009Dorothea found an intriguing survey - If it's not online... - in which physicists and astronomers say, pretty much, that 'if an article is not online then it is not worth the effort to obtain it'.
An interesting discussion (with a couple of more links added by others) ensued here.
What do you assume if a paper is not online? Do you track it down anyway? What are your criteria for choosing to do so?
clock | March 13, 2009From an e-mail from SPARC and The Alliance for Taxpayer Access yesterday:
FIRST U.S. PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY MADE PERMANENT
2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist
Washington, D.C. - March 12, 2009 - President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes' of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the…
clock | March 13, 2009The unmovable movers! Or so says Bill Hooker:
For instance: I use Open Office in preference to Word because I'm willing to put up with a short learning curve and a few inconveniences, having (as they say here in the US) drunk the Open Kool-Aid. But I'm something of an exception. Faced with a single difficulty, one single function that doesn't work exactly like it did in Word, the vast majority of researchers will throw a tantrum and give up on the new application. After all, the Department pays the Word license, so it's there to be used, so who cares about monopolies and stifling free culture…
clock | March 11, 2009Cameron comes up with several persuasive reasons in Why good intentions are not enough to get negative results published:
The idea is that there is a huge backlog of papers detailing negative results that people are gagging to get out if only there was somewhere to publish them. Unfortunately there are several problems with this. The first is that actually writing a paper is hard work. Most academics I know do not have the problem of not having anything to publish, they have the problem of getting around to writing the papers, sorting out the details, making sure that everything is in good…
clock | March 11, 2009Bill decided to take a look:
Fooling around with numbers:
Interesting, no? If the primary measure of a journal's value is its impact -- pretty layouts and a good Employment section and so on being presumably secondary -- and if the Impact Factor is a measure of impact, and if publishers are making a good faith effort to offer value for money -- then why is there no apparent relationship between IF and journal prices? After all, publishers tout the Impact Factors of their offerings whenever they're asked to justify their prices or the latest round of increases in same.
There's even some…
clock | March 10, 2009Richard Poynder asks an important question: Open and Shut?: Open Access: Who would you back?:
But as the OA movement has developed an interesting question has arisen: should Green and Gold OA be viewed as concurrent or consecutive activities?
This is not an issue of intellectual curiosity alone: it has important strategic implications for the OA movement. It requires, for instance, that the movement decides whether to treat Green and Gold OA as complementary or competitive activities; and if they are competitive, then where the OA movement should focus its main efforts ...
What do you think?
clock | March 10, 2009Web usage data outline map of knowledge:
When users click from one page to another while looking through online scientific journals, they generate a chain of connections between things they think belong together. Now a billion such 'clickstream events' have been analysed by researchers to map these connections on a grand scale.
The work provides a fascinating snapshot of the web of interconnections between disciplines, which some data-mining experts believe reveals the degree to which work that is not often cited -- including work in the social sciences and humanities -- is widely consulted…