News blog

Open Science: Questions on the networked society

The Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin and the DRadio Wissen invite to discuss the topic of open science: advantages and potential transformations within scientific communication and scientific publishing.
Open Science. Moderne Kommunikationsmittel eröffnen neue Wege des Publizierens und Kooperierens. Verändert sich dadurch Wissenschaft? Wie sehen diese Wandlungsprozesse aus und was daran ist wirklich neu?
In German.

Imminent Changes In The Publication Process In Sciences.

 A free storage service like the arXiv should be enough for disseminating research. While this particular storage has turned elitist over time, new ones like figshare have many added features to make the work of the scientific community easier. Figshare makes good use of cloud based storage and it allows all forms of research to be published. A peer review by the whole scientific community is always better than that done by a chosen few. The journals can still survive ‘scavenging’ for their favoured research works that are already published in Open Sciencedata-repositories. They can choose works from such repositories and re-publish them if they wish to, giving due credit. However, dissemination of research in a place like figshare should be enough for the researcher in terms of publication and credit. A progressive involvement of the community of scientists, as a whole, is required for providing these new systems the much needed impetus.

Decentralized Open infrastructure: an example from The Blue Obelisk

The good news is that information infrastructure can be very cheap and – certainly at an early stage – can be radical altered (refactored) if the community wants. The key thing is COMMUNICATION. As long as we know what other people are doing and saying many of the difficulties are solved.
Blog entry by Peter Murray-Rust, open access & open knowledge advocate, works in Molecular Informatics, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge.

Could the reddit model replace the current scientific publication system?

The reddit model works as follows. Users who sign up on reddit are given four abilities:
  1. submit links
  2. comment on links and other comments
  3. upvote links and comments they think are constructive, and
  4. downvote links and comments they think are unconstructive.
Links and comments that receive a higher score (score = upvotes minus downvotes) are ranked higher in the queue when people view the list of links on reddit. Typically high-scoring links are only ranked high for 24 hours after they are posted, after which time they rapidly decline in the queue.

The Canadian war on public science, basic research and the free and open exchange of scientific information

The Minister of State for Science and Technology effectively voted against:
  • the free and open exchange of scientific information
  • evidence-based policy-making
  • federal government scientists must be enabled to discuss openly their findings
  • federal government should maintain support for its basic scientific capacity across Canada
  • the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area Research Facility

Publishers Have A New Strategy For Neutralizing Open Access — And It’s Working

This seems to be the publishers’ new strategy against open access: not to fight it directly, but to use constant lobbying to inflict a kind of death by a thousand cuts — slicing off a provision here, lengthening an embargo there, pushing implementation further and further into the future — until the final result is almost no different from the status quo.
Blog entry on TechDirt.

Open access for the people

From April 1st this year anyone in receipt of public funding from one of the UK research councils will be required to publish their findings by an open access route. The new policy is causing an almighty row, with researchers complaining about the cost, humanities scholars railing against an agenda set by scientists, publishers and learned societies fretting about lost of income and the House of Lords criticising the haste with which the new rules have been brought into play. 
Stephen Curry for The Guardian.

Impact Factors — Letter to RCUK

Following my post of last week asking RCUK to include in the guidelines on their new open access policy a statement disavowing the use of impact factors in assessing funding applications, I wanted to thank everyone who registered their support. I also wanted to provide the text of the letter that was sent yesterday to Alexandra Saxon, RCUK’s Head of Communications.  All the signatories are listed below.
Stephen Curry’s Blog.