Franzen’s The Kraus Project on Altmetrics

Over the weekend I read "The Kraus Project", the newest book by Jonathan Franzen. In it Franzen translates a couple of texts written by  Viennese satirist Karl Kraus roughly 100 years ago in "Die Fackel". The translations are explained with a multitude of explanatory and autobiographical footnotes put together by Franzen, Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus in general was sceptic of technological change and Franzen describes him as
"Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse."
And somewhere on page 273 of the book a passage in the footnotes struck me as a noteworthy counterargument to the current altmetrics craze:
The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. (Kraus's dictate "Sing, bird, or die" could now read "Tweet, bird, or die.") But what happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter self-promotional decibel levels?
A video on the book project can be found here. SF

Help raise awareness of how the FIRST Act will delay public access

Oppose Section 302 of the proposed FIRST Act
A discussion draft of the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act of 2013 (FIRST) currently being circulated would impose significant barriers to the public’s ability to access to taxpayer funded research by restricting federal science agencies’ ability to provide timely, equitable, online access to articles and data reporting on the results of research that they support. The proposed FIRST Act is not in the best interests of the taxpayers who fund the research, the scientists who make use of it by accelerating scientific progress, the teachers and students who rely on its availability for a high-quality education, and the thousands of U.S. businesses, both small and large, which depend on public access to stay competitive in the global marketplace. One provision of the bill – Section 302 – would undercut federal agencies’ ability to effectively implement the widely-supported White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive on Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research, undermine the public access program pioneered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and put the U.S. at a severe disadvantage among our global competitors.
SPARC.

Push button for open access

Two medical students are helping to turn the dream of making scientific research papers freely accessible into a reality, using the internet of course Some say the meek will inherit the earth but in fact it will be the young. More especially, those young people who know their way around computer technology and who have sparks of imagination and creativity. The Guardian, Occams's Corner.
The Open Access Button.

Why should Ecology be open?

There are a lot of extremely good arguments to defend the fact that Science (as a whole) should be more open. To summarize them very roughly: it's the ethical thing to do as it allows everyone to access information, it's easier for scientists to access information, it's faster than the traditional peer-review system when you need to get your work noticed, and it's much less expensive than closed-source science.
Blog.

Birth of a New School: How Self-Publication can Improve Research

Good read by Micah Allen.  
Today’s young researchers are frequently dismayed to find their pain-staking work producing quality reviews overlooked or discouraged by journalistic editorial practices. In response, the research community has risen to the challenge of reform, giving birth to an ever expanding multitude of publishing tools: statistical methods to detect p-hacking, numerous open-source publication models, and innovative platforms for data and knowledge sharing.

Why should Ecology be open?

Third, and finally, we need to un-install Excel and similar software. What we need instead, is a pandoc for data. pandoc is a tool to convert text formats into other text formats. It's awesome. And with strict data specifications, we should be able to write one for ecology. This will allow use to store data in their correct format (i.e., conforming to the data specification), but use them in another format when we need them in another format.
Good luck with that.