Advances in Open Access à la Nature Publishing Group

Advances in Open Access à la Nature Publishing Group

With its recent launch of Light: Science and Applications, an open access (OA) physical sciences journal, and several more OA specialist publications planned for this year, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is moving forward with its plan to include this publishing model in the center of its business. Though not every NPG journal is fair game for open access, it seems – top-tier publications will remain under a subscription-based model – specialist titles may be a place for further expansion as open access continues to develop.

Polish Government Funding ‚Full Set Of Educational Materials‘ Available Under CC-BY

Polish Government Funding 'Full Set Of Educational Materials' Available Under CC-BY

Polish Prime Minister Office yesterday accepted “Digital School program” with “Digital Textbooks” component included. With 45 million PLN (approx. 15 million USD) funding it has been the biggest governmental Open Educational Resources initiative in Poland so far. The government has decided to fund creating full set of educational materials for grades 4-6 (9-11 year olds). All those resources will be available under CC BY license, which is fully free license according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

Why I don’t really practice open science

Why I don't really practice open science

What is open science? Well, I think of it as talking regularly about my unpublished research on the Internet, generally in my blog or on some other persistent, explicitly public forum. It should be done regularly, and it should be done with a certain amount of depth or self-reflection. (See, for example, the wunnerful Rosie Redfield andNature’s commentary on her blogging of the arsenic debacle & tests thereof.)

Psychology’s Bold Initiative

Psychology's Bold Initiative

Siri Carpenter in Science:

Some psychology researchers argue that a scientific culture that too heavily favors new and counterintuitive ideas over the confirmation of existing results has led to too many findings that are striking for their novelty and published in respected journals—but are nonetheless false. A new online site (PsychFileDrawer.org) lets psychologists post results of replications of experiments—whether they succeed or fail—that would ordinarily never leave their file drawer because most journals decline to publish straightforward replication studies. And a group of more than 50 academic psychologists, which calls itself the Open Science Collaboration, has begun an unprecedented, large-scale project to systematically replicate psychological experiments recently published in leading journals. 

Could we have a “journal” for micro-contributions?

Could we have a “journal” for micro-contributions?

Peter Krautzberger asks:

A question on the side. Could we have a “journal” for micro-contributions? What would that even look like? Would we need peer-review? What would peer-review look like? Could it simply be done in the comments of a blog or by short “replies” on (a common or different) platforms such as arXiv or figshare?

polymath and open science: online collaboration among mathematicians helps accelerate discoveries.

polymath and open science: online collaboration among mathematicians helps accelerate discoveries.
contributed by rebecca nguyen

tim gowers, a renowned british mathematician from the university of cambridge, extended an invitation in 2009 for anyone— mathematicians and nonmathematicians alike— to join him in a “massively collaborative mathematical project”. since the inception of that first “polymath project”, volunteer collaborators have flocked to integrate their own blogs and content into the polymath open-source community. gowers’ first project of networked science connected the expert knowledge of mathematicians, or, as we might think of them, “main characters in a play,” with ideas of active participants from the rest of the world. each contributor built on another’s performance and all the comments added up to the creative process of doing mathematical research together.

Circulation March 2012

Circulation March 2012

Here is a Link to this month »Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes« with a focus on Open Science. It contains four articles on the topic:

Open Science and Data Sharing in Clinical Research: Basing Informed Decisions on the Totality of the Evidence

The Double-Edged Sword of Open Access to Research Data

Strengthening and Opening Up Health Research by Sharing Our Raw Data

The Importance of Clinical Trial Data Sharing: Toward More Open Science

GitHub for Biology: Build or Buy

GitHub for Biology: Build or Buy

When I describe Synapse, the software platform we are building at Sage Bionetworks, I use the analogy “It’s like GitHub for biologists” or “GitHub for data science” a lot.  This seems to be useful, at least for the subset of people that I talk to that know what GitHub is.  For the rest of you, in a nutshell GitHub is a set of online tools to make it super easy to share code and manage software development projects.  It’s evolved into an active community where developers can quickly launch projects, contribute to or reuse existing projects, or recruit new developers to their projects.  It’s got a particularly strong following in the open source community, but is also used by a number of major corporations to run at least some of their projects.

Another noteworthy project in the realm of Open Science. We will see how that one evolves.

Open Science by Oxford University

Open Science by Oxford University

Here is the first episode of the “Oxford University Open Science Podcast”.

From the description:

In this series of podcasts we consider the impact of opening up science: allowing both the research community and the public to freely access the results of scientific work. Individuals can be fully informed about medical or environmental research, students worldwide can get access to the latest work, and software agents can roam the vast scientific knowledge base seeking patterns and correlations that no human has observed. Ultimately, it may profoundly change the way science is done.

The Promise Of Another Open: Open Impact Tracking

The Promise Of Another Open: Open Impact Tracking

Heather Piwowar:

Over the last few months I’ve been having a great time hacking on an app that reveals open altmetrics stats (and their context) for diverse research products.  total-Impact started in a 24-hour hackathon at the Beyond Impact workshop funded by the Open Society Foundations.  Since then a few of us have been unable to put it down.  I’ll talk about it a bit more in a future blog post [added link, also see here], but you are welcome to read more and play around with the alpha releasenow!

The time is clearly right for this sort of app…several similar ones are emerging now too.

Open science versus commercialization: a modern research conflict?

Open science versus commercialization: a modern research conflict?

Here is a link to:

Caulfield, T., Harmon, S., Joly, Y. (2012) Open science versus commercialization: a modern research conflict? Genome Medicine 2012: 4:17.

From the abstract:

Commercialization and open science are not necessarily irreconcilable and could instead be envisioned as complementary elements of a more holistic innovation framework. Given the exploratory nature of our study, we wish to point out the need to gather additional evidence on the coexistence of open science and commercialization policies and on its impact, both positive and negative, on genomics academic research.