open science
clock | July 19, 2008Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship by James A. Evans, ironically behind the paywall, has got a lot of people scratching their heads - it sounds so counter-intuitive, as well as opposite from other pieces of similar research.
There is a good discussion on FriendFeed and another one here.
A commentary at the Chronicle of Higher Education is here, also ironically behind the paywall.
Here is the press release and here is the abstract:
Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled.…
clock | July 18, 2008Scientific Collectivism 1: (Or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved Dissent):
I want to bring up a discussion about what I perceive is a dangerous trend in neuroscience (this may be applicable to other areas of science as well), and that is what I will term "scientific collectivism." I am going to split this into two separate posts because it is so long. This first post is the weaker arguments, and what I see are the less interesting aspects of scientific collectivism-however, they deserve a discussion.
What will you be? and the related Friday Poll: Tinker, Tailor, Biologist, Researcher. So, how…
clock | July 18, 2008Policy for Open Science - reflections on the workshop:
One thing that was very clear to me was that the attendees of the meeting were largely disconnected from the more technical community that reads this and related blogs. We need to get the communication flowing in both directions - there are things the blogosphere knows, that we are far ahead on, and we need to get the information across. There are things we don't know much about, like the legal frameworks, the high level policy discussions that are going on. We need to understand that context. It strikes me though that if we can combine…
clock | July 17, 2008Why are so many scientists reluctant to make full use of Web 2.0 applications, social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and commenting capabilities on some online journals?
Michael Nielsen wrote a very thoughtful essay exploring this question which I hope you read carefully and post comments.
Michael is really talking about two things - one is pre-publication process, i.e., how to get scientists to find each other and collaborate by using the Web, and the other is the post-publication process, i.e., how to get scientists to make their thoughts and discussions about published works more public.…
clock | July 17, 2008The third issue of the Open Access journal 'Evolution: Education and Outreach' has been published, and it is again full of good, thought-provoking articles. You can see them (for free, of course) if you click here.
clock | July 14, 2008How free access internet resources benefit biodiversity and conservation research: Trinidad and Tobago's endemic plants and their conservation status:
Botanists have been urged to help assess the conservation status of all known plant species. For resource-poor and biodiversity-rich countries such assessments are scarce because of a lack of, and access to, information. However, the wide range of biodiversity and geographical resources that are now freely available on the internet, together with local herbarium data, can provide sufficient information to assess the conservation status of…
clock | July 13, 2008Georgia Harper saw an interesting article in USA Today about Open textbooks and, among else, says:
Open access is just one part of a much bigger and more complex picture. I am very optimistic that open access will find its way into the book market (or what we call books today), but again, it's not like that will cut off the flow of revenues. Quite the contrary. It just makes it possible for a lot more people to benefit from the work of authors while authors and those who help them ready their works for public consumption still reap sufficient financial rewards to make creating worthwhile.…
clock | July 13, 2008Now that the spirited debate about the comparative business models of Nature and PLoS has died down, it is nice to take a little break from it all, and then start a new round - this time about publishing models, not business, and what it means for the future of the scientific paper - how the peer-review, impact factors, researcher evaluation, etc. are changing. Of course I am biased, but I love what Cameron Neylon just posted on his blog: What I missed on my holiday or Why I like refereeing for PLoS ONE:
To me the truly radical thing about PLoS ONE is that is has redefined the nature of peer…
clock | July 9, 2008Graduate Junction is a new social networking site designed for graduate students and postdocs. I looked around a bit and found it clean, easy-to-use and potentially useful. This is how they explain it - give it a try and let me know what you think:
The Graduate Junction is a brand new website designed to help early career
researchers make contact with others with similar research interests,
regardless of which department, institution or country they work in. Designed
by two graduate researchers at the University of Durham, The Graduate Junction
has proved very popular with research students…
clock | July 9, 2008When I go around proselatizing for Open Access, I always try to remember to point out that the potential users are not just scientists and physicians in the developing world, or researchers at low-tier or community colleges, but also high schools. So, I was very happy to hear about the existence of Real Science, a website that uses the latest freely available research to use in classrooms:
Imagine teaching the latest science on the same day it appears in the newspapers.
Imagine the kick the kids will get when they say to their parents watching the news on TV: "We did that in school today. It…
clock | July 5, 2008As expected, most of them are free to download. Peter Suber has all the relevant links:
Open Access Opportunities and Challenges: A Handbook (PDF) by Barbara Malina (ed.).
Science Dissemination using Open Access by Canessa and Zennaro.
Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors (PDF) by Kylie Pappalardo.
I also have Scholarly Journals Between the Past & the Future by Martin Rundkvist.
clock | July 5, 2008Heather Morrison just finished teaching her class on Open Access and the student projects are now all online for you to see.
clock | July 5, 2008That is, in a nutshell, the conclusion of this study. If you have free access to a lot of literature, you are much more likely to click on links and download PDFs (which hopefully means you will read the papers, learn from them, improve your science, and cite them when writing your own manuscripts). If you know that most of the time you will see a "pay $60" page instead, you don't bother clicking anyway.
Also, this mainly applies to the new papers - the older papers are rarely looked at - so there is no real need to keep archives TA for any lengthy periods of time.
Peter Suber comments.
clock | July 5, 2008Thanks to Heather for the heads-up:
Instructions for NIH-funded authors have been prominently placed on the PubMed home page.
There is a link to a list of journals that will manage the submission process with the NIH guidelines on behalf of authors - very handy! - as well as instructions for authors who publish in journals that do not provide this service.
clock | July 3, 2008I know that you know that I work for PLoS. So, I know that a lot of you are waiting for me to respond, in some way, to the hatchet-job article by Declan Bucler published in Nature yesterday. Yes, Nature and PLoS are competitors in some sense of the word (though most individual people employed by the two organizations are friendly with each other, and even good personal friends), and this article is a salvo from one side aimed at another. Due to my own conflict of interest, and as PLoS has no intention to in any official way acknowledge the existence of this article (according to the old…
clock | July 2, 2008Yes, I know, Gavin is a dear colleague and a friend, but his latest article, Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health, is just brilliant. A must-read for all concerned with healthcare, medical information and OA publishing:
In this article, I take a rights-based view of this current crisis of restricted access to the results of scientific and medical research. Such research is conducted in the interests of the public, and yet the results are largely kept out of the public domain by traditional corporate publishers who own them,…
clock | July 2, 2008Peter Suber, a thoughtful essay, as always:
In telecommunications the "last-mile problem" is the problem of connecting individual homes and businesses to the fat pipes connecting cities. Because individual homes and businesses are in different locations, hooking up each one individually is expensive and difficult. The term is now used in just about every industry in which reaching actual customers is more difficult than reaching some location, like a store or warehouse, close to customers.
We're facing a last-mile problem for knowledge. We're pretty good at doing research, writing it up,…
clock | July 2, 2008All the usual suspects were there (I was supposed to go but I could not possibly fit it into my calendar) and now you can watch all the videos from all the presenters - just click here and choose:
San Diego, CA, June 30, 2008 -- More than 20 experts presented their views on the future and use of new media and communications in the biological and other sciences. The New Communications Channels in Biology Workshop at UC San Diego was organized by the Calit2-based Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) with funding from the Gordon and…
clock | June 25, 2008ResearchBlogging.org is getting ready for a big upgrade, or so I hear. You can be a part of the process by helping shape up the new categories and subcategories - all you need to do is go to this blog post, see what is already there and post your suggestions in the comments.