open science
clock | September 24, 2008Michael Nielsen wrote another long thought-provoking essay (for his book, I guess):
............Two clarifications are in order. First, when I say that these are examples of scientific facts beyond individual understanding, I'm not saying a single person can't understand the meaning of the facts. Understanding what the Higgs particle is requires several years hard work, but there are many people in the world who've done this work and who have a solid grasp of what the Higgs is. I'm talking about a deeper type of understanding, the understanding that comes from understanding the justification…
clock | September 24, 2008At Harvard, a week ago:
Recap: Wednesday's Health and Human Rights Discussion
Yesterday afternoon at the Loeb Theater, Harvard hosted a forum celebrating the tenth edition of their journal Health and Human Rights. This edition is the journal's first to be presented in open-access format, meaning that anyone can read it without paying the exorbitant fees associated with most journal articles. Bostonist was in the front row as Agnes Binagwaho, Gavin Yamey, Philip Alston, and Paul Farmer (profiled as "a man who would cure the world" by Tracy Kidder) discussed the past, present, and future of…
clock | September 21, 2008Danica announced:
The third BlogOpen: meeting of all the participants in blogosphere (from authors, readers, IT workers to mainstream media) will happen on October 4-5 in in Bor, Brestovacka banja, Serbia. Main goals of this public meeting are:
1. Discussion about the topics and problems characteristic of this manner of public communication;
2. Realization of virtual communication in real, public space;
3. Calling wider public's attention to this mode of authors' presence and to the importance of an information society;
4. Promotion of an information society, electronic…
clock | September 21, 2008The September 2007 issue of JCOM - Journal of Science Communication - (issue 3, volume 7) is online.: Next issue will be online on the 18th December 2008. There are several articles in this issue that I find interesting and bloggable.
Contents:
EDITORIAL - The better you know, the better you make your choice. The need for a scientific citizenship in the era of knowledge by Pietro Greco:
Martin W. Bauer is right, two evolutionary processes are under way. These are quite significant and, in some way, they converge into public science communication: a deep evolution of discourse is unfolding,…
clock | September 19, 2008You probably remember the wonderful new NIH law that passed last year:
On Dec 26th, 2007, President Bush signed the Bill that requires all NIH-funded research to be made available to the public.
The bill mandates all NIH-funded research to be made freely available to public within 12 months of publication.
You probably also remember that the big publishers opposed the law, using some very unsavoury tactics. Well, guess what? They are at it again. They are trying to sneak through Congress a new bill that is, in essence, the repeal of the NIH open access law. The bill, dubbed in a typical…
clock | September 15, 2008
First, there was the First NC Science Blogging Conference. Then, there was the Second NC Science Blogging Conference. And yes, we will have the Third one - renamed ScienceOnline'09 to better reflect the scope of the meeting: this time bigger and better than ever.
ScienceOnline'09 will be held Jan. 16-18, 2009 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.
Please join us for this free three-day event to explore science on the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, bloggers, educators, students, journalists, writers, publishers, Web developers and others to discuss,…
clock | September 13, 2008Vedran tells me that people from the Oncology Institute in Belgrade, who usually give women little brochures that describe breast self-exam in words, are now using - and loving - the two videos (originally from here) he has embedded into his Gynecology aggregator. Another win for Open Access.
clock | September 10, 2008Vedran continues to spread the Openness in Serbia:
"Anglo-American School Belgrade, a small private school in Belgrade, started its academic year with an opening ceremony celebrating the joy of learning.
Teachers who gathered on the first day of school learned about the intention of the school management to offer them a number of links to Open Access repositories and Open Access RSS feed aggregators for use in educational practice. Teachers learned about the freedom of knowledge and, with great enthusiasm, started to explore a variety of resources of information in order to enrich lectures…
clock | September 1, 2008Towards a Data Sharing Culture: Recommendations for Leadership from Academic Health Centers:
Sharing biomedical research and health care data is important but difficult. Recognizing this, many initiatives facilitate, fund, request, or require researchers to share their data [1-5]. These initiatives address the technical aspects of data sharing, but rarely focus on incentives for key stakeholders [6]. Academic health centers (AHCs) have a critical role in enabling, encouraging, and rewarding data sharing. The leaders of medical schools and academic-affiliated hospitals can play a unique role…
clock | August 29, 2008The cat is out of the bag! The version2.0 of ResearchBlogging.org is ready to go and you can test it out:
After a week of late nights and hard coding, our development team has released the beta version of the site to our entire userbase! You can visit the new site here:
http://72.32.57.144/index.php/
We are planning on launching the site at the researchblogging.org address over the weekend, but you can get a head start now setting up your account, customizing it the way you like, and trying out all our new features. (note: All passwords have been reset, so you'll need to use the "forgot…
clock | August 28, 2008SPARC, Students for FreeCulture and PLoS are organizing the first ever Open Access Day on October 14, 2008. This is also the 5th birthday of PLoS Biology, the oldest of seven PLoS journals.
For this occasion, the organizers have put together a nice website/blog where you can find all the information. You can watch videos (two so far, but there will be more). You can help spread the word:
You can get prizes. Or you can enter the blog contest:
Coming soon...
Prior to Open Access Day, bloggers will be invited to draft a personal post addressing the following key points:
* Why does Open…
clock | August 27, 2008Why is the letter P the most useful for alliterative titles?
But back to the substance. One thing that bugged me for a long time is that I often see on blogs or hear in person a sentiment that "there are no comments on PLoS ONE". Yet I spend quite some time every week opening and reading all the new comments so I KNOW they are there and that there is quite a bunch of them already. Why the difference in perception? Is it due to the predictable distribution (a few papers get lots of comments, most get one or none, just like blog posts)?
So, when we saw this nice analysis of commenting on…
clock | August 26, 2008From SciFoo 08:
Victoria Stodden discusses her efforts to create a new license for scientific research which covers both publication and data. She discusses the motivations behind the new license and the issues brought up by releasing scientific research and data under and open source license.
Copyright 2008 O'Reilly News. All Rights Reserved. Filmed at Scifoo 2008 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA by Tim O'Brien.
clock | August 26, 2008Jean-Claude Bradley reviews Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs by Morton A. Meyers. Morton says:
An applicant for a research grant is expected to have a clearly defined program for a period of three to five years. Implicit is the assumption that nothing unforeseen will be discovered during that time and, even if something were, it would not cause distraction from the approved line of research. Yet the reality is that many medical discoveries were made by researchers working on the basis of a fallacious hypothesis that led them down an unexpected fortuitous path.
Jean…
clock | August 26, 2008Judge Rules That Content Owners Must Consider Fair Use Before Sending Takedowns:
A judge's ruling today is a major victory for free speech and fair use on the Internet, and will help protect everyone who creates content for the Web. In Lenz v. Universal (aka the "dancing baby" case), Judge Jeremy Fogel held that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA").
clock | August 26, 2008For those of you interested in the science publishing business, there is an interesting paper out about Impact Factors, where they do the math to try to explain why the IFs are apparentluy always rising from year to year, and to figure out the differences between disciplines. They remain agnostic pretty much about the whole hot controversy about the validity of IF, but their data explain some facts about IF that can be added, IMHO, into the growing lists of reasons why IF should be abandoned:
Althouse, B.M., West, J.D., Bergstrom, C.T., Bergstrom, T. (in press). Differences in impact factor…
clock | August 22, 2008Boston Globe has an interesting article about Open Science, citing the routine list of worries that usually get associated with this idea, e.g., :
But in the world of science - where promotions, tenure, and fortune rest on publishing papers in prestigious journals, securing competitive grants, and patenting discoveries - it's a brazen, potentially self-destructive move. To many scientists, leaving unfinished work and ideas in the open seems as reckless as leaving your debit card and password at a busy ATM machine.
But, as John Hawks says:
I think that's a pretty simplistic rendering of how…
clock | August 21, 2008This is big! A new agreement was signed between Max Planck Society and Public Library of Science in which the MPS will pay publication fees for its researchers. Mark Patterson explains:
The MPS is one of the world's leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. We are delighted to be collaborating with the MPS in this way so that more MPS researchers will be encouraged to publish their work in PLoS journals, and to promote open access to research literature more broadly. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1st, 2008…
clock | August 20, 2008Eva Amsen: How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies:
Many, if not most, scientists are not in the habit of putting things online. The ones that are might be tempted by the concept of sharing the papers they read, letting everyone look at their lab notebook, joining a forum or writing a blog. If you're reading this in your RSS feed or clicked through from FriendFeed, you're probably one of those people. But think about your friends and colleagues who only turn on their computer for work and e-mail. They're not going to tag their favourite papers or discuss the process of research…