Open Access
scientificactivist | August 28, 2007This is about the only appropriate response to the absurdity of the the anti-open access organization PRISM. A commenter on the last post pointed me to PISD, the Partnership for Integrity in Scientific Dis-semination:
The Partnership for Integrity in Scientific Dis-semination was established by a concerned group of biomedical scientists to combat the steady encroachment of Open Access (OA) publishing initiatives on the profit margins of traditional publishers. Major academic publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Blackwell Publishing, and Springer earn millions of dollars every year selling…
scientificactivist | August 28, 2007This is all over the blogosphere already, but since I occasionally blog about open access issues, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the controversy over a new anti-open access organization called PRISM. The go-to post on this topic is at A Blog Around the Clock, where Bora is collecting reactions from around the blogosphere. Peter Suber first alerted the net to this insidious organization over at Open Access News.
PRISM was apparently formed in response to the House's passage last month of mandatory public access to publications stemming from NIH-supported research. The press release…
evolgen | August 26, 2007Why should advisers encourage their students to publish? For the answer, read this post by TR Gregory.
Why is the publishing industry afraid of open access? I can't answer that question, but I can point you to the evidence for their fear: it's right here. Jonathan Eisen points out why PRISM, the anti-open access lobbying group, is total bullshit. The Open Reading Frame doesn't like it either.
scientificactivist | July 20, 2007In my post earlier today, I stressed the need for the NIH to mandate open access to research publications supported by its funding:
As the largest supporter of biomedical research in the US, the NIH has a special obligation to make sure that its (taxpayer funded!) research is published in the public domain. Since May 2005, the NIH has had an optional open access program that revolves around PubMed Central. Specifically, the NIH "requests and strongly encourages all investigators to make their NIH-funded peer-reviewed, author's final manuscript available to other researchers and the public…
scientificactivist | July 20, 2007I've been tagged by Hope for Pandora (who was tagged by DrugMonkey, who was tagged by Writedit) in a blog meme regarding the NIH's request for feedback on its peer review system. I'm not huge into these blog memes, so I'm not going to pass this along to seven others, but I will share a few thoughts.
Being only in the second year of my Ph.D. (and studying overseas), I haven't applied for an NIH grant before, so I'm not intimately familiar with the NIH's peer review system and can't offer much in the way of constructive criticism there. I can, however, speak generally about some of the major…
evolgen | July 19, 2007Bill Hooker has taken Nature editor Maxine Clark to task for her claims about the open access status of the online features offered by the Nature Publishing Group. Maxine points to the various free online services offered by Nature -- including Nature Precedings, Nature Reports, Nature Network, Scintilla, and the journal Molecular Systems Biology -- in claiming that Nature has "many open access projects and products". Bill disagrees. You should read his entire post, but the punchline is that Clark is redefining Open Access to fit Nature's model and to be used as a marketing device.
A big…
revere | July 6, 2007If you live in the US pay taxes and some of those taxes go to support important basic research into the causes of disease. Most of that research is disbursed through an elaborate peer-reviewed granting system at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The point of doing that research is to tell the world scientific community what you have found. "Normal" scientific progress is incremental, building on the work of other scientists. Paying for that research has been shown to be a good investment that has paid for itself many times over. But if you've paid for it once in taxes, why should you…
revere | March 16, 2007Even Republican jerks like Texas's Senator John ("I never met a surge I didn't like") Cornyn can get it right sometimes. Law of Averages? I don't know, but I certainly approve of his promise to re-introduce the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695) which would require tax-payer funded research to be freely available within 6 months of publication -- in other words, Open Access for federally funded research. Even more amazing, the bill is co-sponsored by Independent (as in "really a Republican") Senator, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (as in, "I never met a surge I didn't like"). Maybe he…
revere | February 20, 2007Every time I post something here about those bastards at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and their record company cronies I get a comment about how a teenie downloading music is a thief. Those poor movie producers and record companies! Mugging victims.
Look over on the left sidebar at the badge under the blogroll. You'll see we are licensed under a Creative Commons license. The license I chose has some of my rights reserved, but allows anyone to:
Share -- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work,
or to
Remix -- to make derivative works
But only under the following…
revere | January 26, 2007When three separate people send you an article in Nature it gets your attention. Since I have a paid subscription to Nature, my attention was ready to be grabbed anyway, but I hadn't yet read this story so a tip of the hat to my informants. I also have paid personal subscriptions to Science and a number of other journals. I am not opposed to subscriptions for journals. But the story is about how some big scientific publishing houses have gotten together and hired a notorious PR hit man to battle Open Access publishing, apparently by any means necessary, whether intellectually honest or not. I…
scientificactivist | November 29, 2006Anyone who has tried to replicate an experiment based on the description published in a paper knows that this can be difficult, frustrating, and often close to impossible. The protocols in the Methods section can be incomplete, even inaccurate, and sometimes lead the hopeful reader down a trail of never-ending references to previous papers, eventually arriving at a protocol only marginally related to what the reader actually set out to find.
One answer to this problem, in a few cases at least, might be a new video journal spearheaded by Moshe Pritsker, a postdoc at Harvard Medical School/…
scientificactivist | July 11, 2006According to this week's Science magazine, there's some good news and some bad news regarding open access publishing. Which do you want first?
The bad news? OK, here goes.
According to a letter (free access via Sex Drugs & DNA) authored by Michael Stebbins, Erica Davis, Lucas Royland, and Gartrell White (mostly of the Federation of American Scientists), the NIH's voluntary open access project, PubMed Central, has been a massive failure due primarily to lack of compliance:
The NIH public access policy requests that NIH-supported investigators submit final peer-reviewed primary research…
scientificactivist | June 22, 2006Today's issue of Nature includes a particularly damning news story about the financial troubles facing the Public Library of Science, a publisher of several prestigious open access journals. In the article, Nature describes PLoS's difficulties and heavily stresses its continued reliance on philanthropic grants.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS), the flagship publisher for the open-access publishing movement, faces a looming financial crisis. An analysis of the company's accounts, obtained by Nature, shows that the company falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even. In an…
scientificactivist | June 14, 2006Via Evolving Thoughts comes news that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is starting a series of blogs to promote its recently announced interdisciplinary PLoS ONE journal. PLoS publishes several prestigious open access scientific journals and is now taking things a step further with a new journal that will, among other things, "empower the scientific community to engage in a discussion on every paper and provide readers with tools to annotate and comment on papers directly." In the stuffy culture of science publishing, this is a pretty big deal.
Although PLoS ONE won't use open peer…
scientificactivist | June 12, 2006Here at The Scientific Activist, we welcome criticism--intelligent criticism, that is (as opposed to unintelligible dribble like this). Besides, when it comes to boosting traffic stats, any link is a good link, so I thought I should give a shout out to some of the nice folks who linked to me over the last couple of days, even though they basically disagreed with everything I wrote.
First up is Dr. Jim Hu--a professor of biochemistry at my alma mater, Texas A&M University--who runs a blog called Blogs for Industry. Although we are at odds on pretty much any every political issue, he's…
scientificactivist | June 12, 2006It looks like it's going to be a pretty busy day for me, so here's a post from the archives. I picked this one because it's still very timely (the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 is still in committee in the Senate) and it's related to my recent post on open peer review.
(4 May 2006) As society slowly shifts toward more participatory forms of democracy, science policy will increasingly be subject to the will of the general population. The creation of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine via voter-initiated Proposition 71 in 2004 stands as a significant example of…
scientificactivist | June 8, 2006One of the fundamental principles of modern science, as well as other academic pursuits, is peer review. By subjecting a submitted paper to evaluation by other scientists in the authors' field, the solid science advances at the expense of the not-so-good and the interesting and relevant prevails above the unoriginal. In theory, of course. The effect is a growing body of scientific knowledge that, while still large and unwieldy, is at best authoritative and at the very least trustworthy and accurate. It's a kind of democratization of knowledge, at least in a narrow sense.
But, as in any…