Have you, or your organization, created or repackaged/reused quality content (from briefing papers, to presentations, videos, etc) on open access, open data and open science in any language, which can be useful and used on the FOSTER training context?
I co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2002 because I believed deeply that the open access publishing model PLOS espoused and has come to dominate was good for science, scientists and the public. Over the past decade open access has become a personal crusade – my own religion – one I have fervently promoted here on this blog, on social media, and to thousands of colleagues at meetings and social engagements. To back up my commitment to open access, since 2000, I have exclusively published papers from my lab in open access journals, and have urged – some might say hectored and harassed – my colleagues to do the same.But in the last few weeks I have had a major change of heart.
The Web of Science and its corresponding Journal Impact Factor are inadequate for an understanding of the impact of scholarly work from developing regions, argues Juan Pablo Alperin. Alternative metrics offer the opportunity to redirect incentive structures towards problems that contribute to development, or at least to local priorities. But the altmetrics community needs to actively engage with scholars from developing regions to ensure the new metrics do not continue to cater to well-known and well-established networks.
LSE Impact Blog.
Was diese Prognosen antreibt, sind drei Vorstellungen. (1) „Das Internet“ ist eine Technologie, die aus sich heraus alle Eigenschaften des Wissens verändern wird. (2) Wissenschaft und Universität waren zuvor gefesselt und kompromittiert, so dass die Zeit reif ist, um sie neu zu fassen. (3) Mehr „Offenheit“ ist die Lösung für alle Probleme und nicht zuletzt politisch unbedingt und ausnahmslos wünschbar. Alle drei Ansichten sind weit verbreitet. Keine ist so, wie sie hier formuliert wurde, wahr. Über die erste Behauptung will ich mich hier nicht weiter äußern, das haben andere getan, die den naiven technologischen Determinismus kritisiert haben, dem anheimfällt, wer das Internet wie ein Ding behandelt, das uns ein bestimmtes Verhalten auferlegt. Was mich mehr beschäftigt ist die Politische Ökonomie der „Wissenschaft 2.0“ und die Art, wie sie jene politische Entscheidungen unsichtbar macht, die wir in Bezug auf all die genannten Fragen treffen müssen. Vielleicht fasse ich meine Frage am besten so: Wenn „Offenheit“ die Lösung sein soll, was ist dann das Problem?
Beide Seiten aber fänden es gut, wenn alle Zusatzkosten der Publikation auf die Universitäten verlagert würden, von denen sie ohnehin nicht glauben, dass sie die Zukunft der Forschung repräsentieren. So ist die einzige plausible Prognose die, dass wenn die Rolle von Universitäten und Bibliotheken weiter untergraben wird, das gesamte System der „Peer Review“ ersetzt werden wird durch eine Art marktbasierte Evaluation von Artikeln, die dann im Stile von „Gefällt mir“-Buttons der Weisheit der Menge überlassen bleibt. Insofern hat „Open Science 2.0“ nichts mit einer Demokratisierung oder anderweitigen Verbesserung von Forschung zu tun. Was damit bezweckt wird ist vielmehr, einige große Firmen an den Eingängen zur modernen Kommerzialisierung des Wissens gut zu positionieren.
METRIC, The Economist reports, is led by Stanford professor John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist who in 2005 famously wrote "Why most published research findings are false," a paper that sought to prove that research can and is often marred by sloppy statistical findings and shoddy ideas.
This is a slide from Ian Mulvany's slide deck on 'publishing and funding', which made me smile. You can find the entire deck here.
This week: shining new light on the bad side of science, early indicators of Alzheimer's disease and why elephants like hearing some languages better than others. For more video content from The Economist visit our website: http://econ.st/1iE0bgv
Berlin-based ResearchGate, in which Bill Gates is a prominent investor, provided a platform for study results that led to highly embarrassing backpedaling from a Japanese research institute.Update: Here is the Wallstreet Journal's piece on it.
The post is about the importance of publication of data and software where currently the rewards are stacked disproportionately in favor of text publications. The intended audience is probably mainly other scientists (Björn is a neurobiologist) who are reluctant to publish data and/or code, but there is another interesting aspect to this.
Martin Fenner.
So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts. I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more. Be that as it may, it is now March 6, 2014, six days since PLoS’s ‘revolutionary’ data sharing policy was revealed and only few people seem to observe the irony of avid social media participants pretending it’s still 1982. For the uninitiated, just skim Twitter’s #PLoSfail, read Edmund Hart’s post or see Terry McGlynn’s post for some examples. I’ll try to refrain from reiterating any arguments made there already.
Science 2.0 sees the emergence of data-driven research as a defining feature of this new movement. Digital delivery and storage have revolutionised the way in which data is captured, stored and made available for sharing. The presentation will look at the Royal Society's Report Science as an Open Enterprise to identify the challenges and opportunities that Open Science brings. The session will then look at the newly-produced LERU Roadmap for Research Data (launched in Brussels on 22 January 2014). The Roadmap makes over 40 recommendations for research-led universities on what they need to do to meet the challenges. The paper will conclude with an analysis of how UCL will meet these challenges.
But expanding your own creativity doesn’t suit everybody. For the exceptional students, the ones who can and probably will make a mark, they will still need institutions free from regulation.
The thing is to have no discipline at all. Biology got its main success by the importation of physicists that came into the field not knowing any biology and I think today that’s very important.
I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals.
If you send a PDF of your own paper to a friend, then you are committing an infringement. Of course they can’t police it, and many of my colleagues just slap all their papers online. I think you’re only allowed to make a few copies for your own purposes. It seems to me to be absolutely criminal. When I write for these papers, I don’t give them the copyright. I keep it myself. That’s another point of publishing, don’t sign any copyright agreement. That’s my advice. I think it’s now become such a giant operation. I think it is impossible to try to get control over it back again.
Labbé stellt im Nature-Artikel zudem recht deutlich heraus, dass er (anders als Bohannon) keinen Zusammenhang zwischen schlampiger oder fehlender Qualitätssicherung und dem Publikationsmodell (Open Access oder Subskription) erkennen kann, schließlich erschienen alle von ihm aufgedeckten Betrugsfälle in Subskriptionsjournalen.
In an effort to increase access to this data, we are now revising our data-sharing policy for all PLOS journals: authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article. Beginning March 3rd, 2014, all authors who submit to a PLOS journal will be asked to provide a Data Availability Statement, describing where and how others can access each dataset that underlies the findings. This Data Availability Statement will be published on the first page of each article.
A new global monitoring system has been launched that promises "near real time" information on deforestation around the world.
BBC News.
So try it for yourself. Which compound is wrong? (*I* don’t know yet) How would you find out? Maybe you would go to Chemical Abstracts (ACS). Last time I looked it cost 6USD to look up a compound. That’s 50 dollars, just to check whether the literature is right. And you would be forbidden from publishing what you found there (ACS sent the lawyers to Wikipedia for publishing CAS registry numbers). What about Elsevier’s Reaxys? Almost certainly as bad.
petermr's blog
One in four Americans doesn’t know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but this says much more about culture than it does about education
Occam's Corner / The Guardian.
