While working towards his PhD in mathematical ecology at the University of California, Davis, Carl Boettiger launched a kind of career experiment. He started keeping an open lab notebook online, aiming to find new ways to communicate science and to seed collaborations. As he begins a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Boettiger explains the pros and cons of sharing his work on the Internet.Nature Q&A.
Providing college students with free textbooks is no easy task. That seems to be the major lesson from several efforts to produce e-books that are low-cost or free to help reduce students’ costs. Money pressures, slow adoption by professors, and quality concerns stand in the way as these projects hope to rival traditional publishing.The Chronicle.
At the moment I am working on a research design that helps me investigating parameters for participation in open science. The design is, to be honest, not cut in stone yet and my methodological ideas change every now and then. Nonetheless, I documented my overall ideas for a research design in an open 1.5 pages document, accessible via Google Docs (this link). If you have a few minutes free on your hand and interest in the topic, I invite you to scim through the document and leave comments if you have any good thoughts, ideas, criticism and suggestions.