News blog

Springer Also Losing Some OA Sparkle

Springer’s new policy says that authors may make the post-refereed versions of their articles available immediately on their personal websites but must wait a year before making them available in repositories. This embargo is nothing new with respect to subject repositories — Springer’s previous policy required a year-long embargo for subject repositories. But it is new for institutional repositories — Springer used to allow articles to appear immediately there. This change to a year-long embargo for institutional repositories makes self-archiving harder and more confusing and thus less likely to be attempted. So that’s bad. And in addition to being a bad change, it’s arguably a nonsensical change.

Bioengineers look beyond patents

Synthetic-biology company pushes open-source models.
Open access to validated molecular components is crucial to the field’s success, says Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University in California. Endy says that synthetic biologists are similar to software engineers, with the genetic code as their programming language. The software industry has favoured open-source approaches and copyright protections, because inventions often come faster than patents can be acquired. The same holds for synthetic biology (...).
Nature.

An Inclusive Approach to Open Science

Peter Kraker's suggestions openness in science.
In our view, all of these problems can be addressed by a more open approach to science. We see Open Science as making the scientific  process and all of its outcomes openly accessible to the general public. Open Science would benefit science, because it would make results more  reproducible, and quality control more transparent. Open Science would also benefit the society by including more people in the process and sparking open innovation.
Read here

Microsampling Air Pollution

Near the corner of Tillary and Jay Streets in Brooklyn, Michael Heimbinder stood near a blue mailbox, head down, poking at his smartphone. A graph appeared: a single line plotting ambient carbon monoxide exposure in the neighborhood. Minutes later, he ran over to an idling Honda Pilot and held a small, black sensor to its tailpipe. On his phone, carbon monoxide levels, predictably, jumped off the chart. A woman opened the car door and said, “Can I help you out?”


The New York Times.

New Open Access policy at Oregon State University

With the spread of Open Access in the scientific community, now universities, institutions and sometimes even governments introduce special policies to standardize the process of sharing and publishing research results in an open and free-of-charge way. Over the past few years, dozens of universities have introduced OA policies and have opened special funds for publishing in this model. Oregon State University did the same thing recently.  
As the first university in the Pacific Northwest and one of the first land grant universities in the USA, Oregon State University has adopted an open access policy requiring faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free through a digital repository.

Visualization Tools for Open Government Date

In recent years many government organizations have implemented Open Government Data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available. This data usually covers a broad set of domains, from financial to ecological information. While these initiatives often report anecdotal success regarding improved efficiency and governmental savings, the potential applications of OGD remain a largely uncharted territory. In this paper, we claim that there is an important portion of the population who could benefit from the use of OGD, but who cannot do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge, and make sense of the data. The reasons behind these problems are multiple, the most critical one being a fundamental lack of expertise and technical knowledge. We propose the use of visualizations as a way to alleviate this situation. Visualizations provide a simple mechanism to understand and communicate large amounts of data. We also show evidence that there is a need for exploratory mechanisms to navigate the data and metadata in these visualizations. Finally, we provide a discussion on a set of features that tools should have in order to facilitate the creation of visualizations by users. We briefly present the implementation of these features in a new tool prototype focused on simplifying the creation of visualization based on Open Data.   Read more here

Jenny Molloy on Openness in 21st Century Science

A team of researchers at the University of Oxford and University of Koblenz recently joined forces to organise an event on ‘Rigour and Openness in 21st Century Science‘ examining whether and how recent developments in open science can lead to increased reproducibility and rigour in scientific research. While the key themes of open access and data were addressed, other sessions touched on the question of how to ensure data collected and analysed by citizens is validated, the role of openness in innovation and pre-competitive commercial environments and new technical services that are being built to facilitate sharing, analysis and further application of research outputs.
See more at: http://blog.okfn.org/2013/06/25/rigour-and-openness-in-21st-century-science/

Interview with „alternative academic“ Eric Kansa on Open Context

"Alternative academic" Eric Kansa starting working on Open Context more than a decade ago to promote access to archaeological research data that rarely saw the light of day. Last week Kansa, a researcher with the University at California, Berkeley School of Information, was honored for his efforts to make more of that data public. The Alamedan caught up with Kansa just as he was getting on a plane to Italy for a dig.

The Alamedan.

Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank

Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system.
Read the full article by Björn Brembs, Katherine Button and Marcus Munafò online. It's hot off the press.

Can Data-sharing prevent Data Fraud?

This paper discusses the conclusions and recommendations of two reports that were published recently in consequence of this data fraud. The reports are relevant for scientific integrity and trustworthy treatment of research data. Next, this paper reports on the outcomes of enquiries in data cultures in a number of scientific disciplines. The concluding section of this paper contains a number of examples that show that the approach towards data sharing is improving gradually. The data fraud case can be regarded as a wake-up call. (read here)

Crowdfunding for better citizen science?

Nearly 13,000 people have backed the Planetary Resources' kickstarter pitch. The US company's plan is to build the 'first publicly accessible space telescope'.
As with other Kickstarter campaigns, the rewards increase for higher amounts. People pledging $200 or more will be able to point the telescope at any celestial object – "other than the Sun" – and have a high-definition image sent to them. Those pledging $5,000 or more will be invited to launch events and have their names etched on the spacecraft.
Read more here.