open science
clock | February 11, 2009From The Alliance for Taxpayer Access:
CALL TO ACTION: Ask your Representative to oppose the H.R. 801 - The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act
February 11, 2009
Last week, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) re-introduced a bill that would reverse the NIH Public Access Policy and make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place. The legislation is H.R. 801: the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.801:).
All supporters of public access - researchers, libraries, campus…
clock | February 10, 2009
The Conyers bill (a.k.a. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801), is back. Despite all the debunking it got last time around, and despite the country having more important problems to deal with right now, this regressive bill, completely unchanged word-for-word, is apparently back again. It is the attempt by TA publishers, through lies and distortions, to overturn the NIH open access policy. Here are some reactions - perhaps Rep.Conyers and colleagues should get an earful from us....
Peter Suber, in Comments on the Conyers bill provides all the useful links, plus some of the…
clock | February 10, 2009This appears to be from Google: GPeerReview:
We intend for the peer-review web to do for scientific publishing what the world wide web has done for media publishing. As it becomes increasingly practical to evaluate researchers based on the reviews of their peers, the need for centralized big-name journals begins to diminish. The power is returned to those most qualified to give meaningful reviews: the peers. As long as big journals provide a useful service, this tool will only enhance their effectiveness. But the more they take months to review our publications, and the more they give…
clock | February 9, 2009I will be on a panel, Open Science: Good For Research, Good For Researchers? next week, February 19th (3:00 to 5:00 pm EST at Columbia University, Morningside Campus, Shapiro CEPSR Building, Davis Auditorium). I am sure my hosts will organize something for us that day before and/or after the event, but Mrs.Coturnix and I will be there a couple of days longer. So, I think we should have a meetup - for Overlords, SciBlings, Nature Networkers, independent bloggers, readers and fans ;-)
Is Friday evening a good time for this? Or is Saturday better? Let me know.
You can follow the panel on…
pontiff | January 19, 2009From a crazy model to a concrete question: is there a nice mathematical structure hidden here?
Once upon a time I wrote a crazy paper (arXiv:quant-ph/03091189) on quantum computation in the presence of closed time-like curves. In this model, one identifies two types of quantum systems: those that are "chronology respecting" and those that traverse "closed time-like curves." These two types of quantum systems can interact amongst themselves and also between each other. A typical setup is as in the figure at the right, where n chronology respecting qubits interact with l closed time-like qubits…
clock | January 13, 2009Science 2.0: New online tools may revolutionize research quotes Michael Nielsen, Eva Amsen, Corie Lok and Jean-Claude Bradley. Article is good but short. If you come to ScienceOnline'09 or participate virtually, you can get the longer story straight from them.
clock | January 8, 2009Michael Nielsen posted today the first part of his look at peer-review: Three myths about scientific peer review:
What's the future of scientific peer review? The way science is communicated is currently changing rapidly, leading to speculation that the peer review system itself might change. For example, the wildly successful physics preprint arXiv is only very lightly moderated, which has led many people to wonder if the peer review process might perhaps die out, or otherwise change beyond recognition.
I'm currently finishing up a post on the future of peer review, which I'll post in the…
clock | December 21, 2008There was a good reason why the form and format, as well as the rhetoric of the scientific paper were instituted the way they were back in the early days of scientific journals. Science was trying to come on its own and to differentiate itself from philosophy, theology and lay literature about nature. It was essential to develop a style of writing that is impersonal, precise, sharply separating data from speculations, and that lends itself to replication of experiments.
The form and format of a scientific paper has evolved towards a very precise and very universal state that makes scientist-…
clock | December 19, 2008Changes in publication statistics when electronic submission was introduced in an international applied science journal:
In a refereed journal in the food and agriculture sector, papers were tracked over a five-year period during the introduction of electronic submissions. Papers originated in the Americas and Pacific region and were processed in Canada. Acceptance times for revised papers were reduced (P < 0.001) to 59% of the original, from 156.5 ± 69.1 days to 92.8 ± 57.5 days. But the start of electronic submission coincided with a change in the geographical origin of papers, with…
clock | December 18, 2008Publish in Wikipedia or perish:
Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.
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The RNA wiki is a subset of a broader project, the WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, which has marshalled hundreds of scientists to improve the content of biology articles in Wikipedia. It, in turn, is collaborating with the Novartis Research Foundation on GeneWiki 3, an effort to…
clock | December 18, 2008The entries for the PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition have been coming in all day. Here are the posts I found so far. If you have posted and your post is not on this list, let me know by e-mail. I will keep updating this post and moving it to the top until the competition closes at dawn tomorrow:
Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science: Predatory slime mould freezes prey in large groups about the article: Exploitation of Other Social Amoebae by Dictyostelium caveatum
Scicurious of Neurotopia (version 2.0): Why Did the Dolphin Carry a Sponge? about the article: Why Do…
clock | December 18, 2008Listen here to the The December 16, 2008 David E. Barmes Global Health Lecture given by Dr.Harold Varmus:
Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, is President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Dr. Varmus chairs the Scientific Board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health program and leads the Advisory Committee for the Global Health Division. He was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Macroeconomics…
clock | December 17, 2008From The Scientist: Flagging fraud:
A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct.
The website -- called Scientific Red Cards -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim.
The database might also prevent researchers from citing papers that they don't even realize are fraudulent, said Claire Ribrault, a PhD student in…
clock | December 17, 2008Oh-oh, Olivia Judson is not up-to-speed on Open Access, Open Science and Science 2.0 stuff - though the article is interesting and thought-provoking:
As a system, it was a little clumsy -- photocopying was a bore, and if I wanted to spend a couple of months writing somewhere other than my office, I had to take boxes of papers with me -- but it worked. I knew what I had and where it was.
Then the scientific journals went digital. And my system collapsed.
On the good side, instead of hauling dusty volumes off shelves and standing over the photocopier, I sit comfortably in my office, downloading…
clock | December 15, 2008Pawel tried, for a year, to be a freelance scientist. While the experiment did not work, in a sense that it had to end, he has learned a lot from the experience. And all of us following his experience also learned a lot about the current state of the world. And I do not think this has anything to do with Pawel living in Poland - I doubt this would have been any different if he was in the USA or elsewhere.
You all know that I am a big fan of telecommuting and coworking and one of the doomsayers about the future existence of the institution of 'The Office'. And you also know that I am a…
clock | December 13, 2008This is pretty long and not easy to read, but it puts together a lot of thoughts about blogs, wikis and the stability of the Web as a science publishing platform. Post your comments there, or here.
clock | December 13, 2008As you know, H.M. died last week.
Listen to this brief (9 minutes) NPR Science Friday podcast - you will be able to hear Henry Gustav Molaison's voice. But most importantly, he has donated his brain to further scientific study. His brain will be sliced and stained and studied at The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego.
But the way they are going to do it will be in a very Open Science manner. Dr. Jacopo Annese, who is leading the project said, in this interview, that the entire process will be open - there will be a forum or a blog where researchers from around…
clock | December 12, 2008On arXiv, by M. E. J. Newman (Santa Fe Institute):
We investigate the structure of scientific collaboration networks. We consider two scientists to be connected if they have authored a paper together, and construct explicit networks of such connections using data drawn from a number of databases, including MEDLINE (biomedical research), the Los Alamos e-Print Archive (physics), and NCSTRL (computer science). We show that these collaboration networks form "small worlds" in which randomly chosen pairs of scientists are typically separated by only a short path of intermediate acquaintances. We…
clock | December 12, 2008Tending to recent immigrants and other travelers, Carlos Franco-Paredes diagnoses diseases that few other physicians in North America have ever seen:
Q: What's the most important diagnostic tool you use?
A: The Internet. We rely on it heavily, probably more than other specialists do. Online, we access recent medical journals from all over the world, including PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and the Journal of Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries. They have really good articles written by people on the local level. But beyond that, we use the Internet to keep up on what's happening in…
clock | December 12, 2008Ideas in Ecology and Evolution is a new Open Access journals which is also experimenting with the review process.
Bob O'Hara and commenters go into details. I hope it does not end like Medical Hypotheses: a great source of blog-fodder for snarky bloggers and not much else. We'll keep an eye....