In December Euan Adie and I [Martin Fenner] started the CrowdoMeter project, an analysis of the semantic content of tweets linking to scholarly papers. Because classifying almost 500 tweets is a lot of work, we turned this into a crowdsourcing project. We got help from 36 people, who did 953 classifications, and we discussed the preliminary results (available here) at the ScienceOnline2012conference.
Here is a piece by Burcu Dogan on the general idea of open science.
Open science is opening the way we make science. It stands for transparency and public accessibility of scientific data, collaboration, methods and results. On the other hand, it supports the existence of public contribution to the current state of science, and giving it back to the public domain.
Here is some satire on the whole Elsevier thing.
My (very small) part in this story started a little over a week ago, when I started a parody Twitter account called “@FakeElsevier“. Since then, I’ve been posting as much Elsevier-related satire as I can manage in my free time, 140 characters at a time. It’s been carthartic for me to inject a tiny bit of humor into an otherwise frustrating and seemingly impossible situation, and the account has gotten much more play on the internet than I was expecting. It seems that others in the academic community want to laugh about this too, even if the jokes all have the flavor of gallows humor.
Here is an interview with PLoS Founder Michael Eisen.
On whether pre-publication peer review should be abandoned?
“This I think we can and should more or less completely do away with — leaving only a very thin process for screening submitted articles to make sure they’re appropriate and real works of science.”
On this site, we’ll talk to people in all walks of life who need access to research but can’t get it because of restrictive publishing practices.
Here is a kickstarter project for the Citizen Science Quarterly.
Citizen Science Quarterly is a print magazine dedicated to sharing our love of science with everyone. We believe everyone can and should do science. And not just watered down science “projects” like a baking soda volcano.
Here is the CBC News’ coverage on the Elsevier boycott.
Here is a conversation between Mike Taylor and Liz Smith (Director of Global Internal Communications at Elsevier). It’s a bit of a culture clash but worth reading.
In a long and interesting comment, Liz wrote (among much else):
This is where there seems to be deliberate obtuseness. Sticking a single PDF up online is easy. But there are millions of papers published every year. It takes a hell of a lot of people and resources to make that happen. You can’t just sling it online and hope somebody can find it. The internet doesn’t happen by magic.
And I replied:
Actually, you can and I do. That is exactly how the Internet works. I don’t have to do anything special to make sure my papers are found — Google and other search engines pick them up, just like they do everything. So to pick an example at random, if you search for brachiosaurus re-evaluation, the very first hit will be my self-hosted PDF of my 2009 JVP paper on that subject. [Correction: I now see that it’s the third hit; the PDF of the correction is top.] Similarly, search for xenoposeidon pdf and the top hit is — get ready for a shock! — my self-hosted PDF of my 2007 Palaeontology paper on that subject.
Here is a Mendeley link to:
Kraker, P., Leony, D., Reinhardt, W., Beham, G. (2011). The Case for an Open Science in Technology Enhanced Learning. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, Vol. 6 (3), 643–654.
Abstract:
In this paper, we make the case for an Open Science in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Open Science means opening up the research process by making all of its outcomes, and the way in which these outcomes were achieved, publicly available on the World Wide Web. In our vision, the adoption of Open Science instruments provides a set of solid and sustainable ways to connect the disjoint communities in TEL. Furthermore, we envision that researchers in TEL would be able to reproduce the results from any paper using the instruments of Open Science. Therefore, we introduce the concept of Open Methodology, which stands for sharing the methodological details of the evaluation provided, and the tools used for data collection and analysis. We discuss the potential benefits, but also the issues of an Open Science, and conclude with a set of recommendations for implementing Open Science in TEL.
Here, Parker Higgings takes the time to look back at ten years of open access.
Ten years ago this week, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was released to the public. This seminal document explained how technology could revolutionize academic publishing, and defined “open access” as the free and unrestricted availability of peer-reviewed journal literature online.
Stunning fact from the article:
In 2008, a subscription to the “Journal of Comparative Neurology,” for example, cost $21,852.
For all those who prefer information in the form of slides: Here is a slide deck on altmetrics, total-impact, and the Decoupled Journal put together by Jason Priem.
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and Pensoft Publishers are pleased to announce a new collaboration that will increase the flow of new species descriptions from scientists in developing countries into the Encyclopedia of Life and promote the open access publishing model in taxonomy.
figshare allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner.
Martin Fenner interviews figshare founder Mark Hahnel. The interview provides some background info on how figshare started, on the relaunch, and on how it works.
Peter Suber is the Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, a Faculty Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Special Advisor at Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication, Senior Researcher at SPARC, Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and a non-practicing lawyer.
The Economist features ResearchGate:
GIVEN journalists’ penchant for sticking the suffix “gate” onto anything they think smells of conspiracy, a public-relations consultant might have suggested a different name. But ResearchGate, a small firm based in Berlin, is immune to such trivia. It is ambitious, too—aiming to do for the academic world what Mark Zuckerberg did for the world in general, by creating a social network for scientists.
Nature:
In the hunt for drugs that target diseases in the developing world, ‘open innovation’ is creating a buzz. Pharmaceutical companies are making entire libraries of chemical compounds publicly available, allowing researchers to rifle through them for promising drug candidates.
From Wired. Includes some interesting links.
From the abstract:
This report examines information practices in the physical sciences across seven cases, and demonstrates the richly varied ways in which physical scientists work, collaborate, and share information and data.
New York Times article from January on Open Science.
Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”
Imagine a world where food is cheap and freely available, thanks to the amazing Teleporting Duplicator. What could go wrong?
Lovely but sad parable about open access. Or, as someone in the comments puts it: “Send me a bacon sandwich.”
Update: And here is Cameron Neylon’s response.
Imagine a world very similar to our own. People buy cars, they fill them with fuel, they pay road tax and these things largely work as well as they do in our own world. There is just one difference, when a car needs its annual service and is taken to a garage – just as we do – for its mechanical checkup and maintenance. In return for the service, the car is then gifted to the mechanic, who in turn provides it back to the owner for a rental fee.
I have become increasingly frustrated with a model of science that increasingly rewards self-promotion rather than knowledge sharing.
The Faculty of 1000 (F1000), in London, has announced an experiment in online science publishing, aimed at sharing research results widely and rapidly, and using open peer review to check postings afterwards.
The F1000 Research Project can be found here.
This is a collection of links to information, opinion, activism, and other issues concerning the practices of research journal publishers (particularly in the mathematical sciences).
Interesting stats on price/page in mathematical journals.
The key to all these issues is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work. If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below.
5600 people so far …