Gold on hold
The move towards providing full open access to research papers was undermined last week, but should prevail in the long term.Nature.
Archives
Permission barriers to text mining
Publishing Research Consortium 2013: Text Mining and Scholarly Publishing by Jonathan Clark, independent advisor on strategy and innovation. Prior he worked with Elsevier for 20 years in various roles in publishing, product management, technology, strategy & business development. Clark is a former Chair and Director of the International DOI Foundation.
Blog post by Peter Suber, director of Harvard open access project.
Scientific Peer Review in Crisis
An opinion on the Danish Cohort study.Seafarer science: Sailors asked to help measure plankton
Scientists are enlisting sailors and fishermen to help with what they hope will be the world’s biggest study of plankton in the oceans.BBC News.
White House directs open access for government research
The White House has moved to make the results of federally funded research available to the public for free within a year, bowing to public pressure for unfettered access to scholarly articles and other materials produced at taxpayers’ expense.Reuters. See also here (In German).
On The Concept Of Shaping Thought With Language
Psychologist Lera Boroditsky says she’s “interested in how the languages we speak shape the way we think”
Out of great, lifelong Joy
S/He who thinks Science is something for Scientists only is mistaken.
(FAZ. In German)
Why should we continue to pay typesetters/publishers lots of money to process (and even destroy) science? And a puzzle for you.
The average large STM publisher receives several thousand USD (either in subscriptions or in author processing charges (APC)) to process an article. This huge and unjustified sum contains not only obscene profits (30-40 %) but also gross inefficiencies and often destruction of scientific content. The point is that publishers decide what THEY want to do irrespective of what authors or sighted human readers want (let alone unsighted readers or machines).Peter Murray-Rust’s Blog.
New Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is misguided
We should celebrate the scientific breakthroughs that benefit the many, not the few
Says grrlscientist in the Guardian Blog.
IT WAS A VERY BIG YEAR, I THINK, FOR OPEN ACCESS
Stephen Curry, professor for biophysics at Imperial College, London and open access advocate, in an interview with Katherine Powell, currently studying an MSc in Science Communication and one of the editors of Refractive Index, a bog on science communication, Imperial College London.Amendment to copyright in Germany: First draft of the Federal Ministry of Justice
See also the draft (in German).Publishers Flip Out, Call Bill To Provide Open Access To Federally Funded Works A ‚Boondoggle‘
Last week, a new version of Doyle’s bill was introduced and it’s been improved. First off, it’s got some nice bipartisan backing in both parts of Congress. On the Senate side, it was co-sponsored by Senators Cornyn and Wyden, while on the House side we’ve got Doyle along with Reps. Yoder and Lofgren. Also, it reduces the time to open publishing from one year down to six months (like a NY bill that came out last year). It doesn’t spread the policy to all federal agencies, but the vast majority of federally funded resarch would qualify (all agencies that spend over $100 million on research are covered).TechDirt.
ACM: tear down this paywall.
We, the undersigned researchers, technologists and citizens, demand that the Association for Computing Machinery make the complete contents of the Digital Library available to everybody.The ACM Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
THE OPEN DATA CENSUS – TRACKING THE STATE OF OPEN DATA AROUND THE WORLD
Recent years have seen a huge expansion in open data activity around the world. This is very welcome, but at the same time it is now increasingly difficult to assess if, and where, progress is being made
An Argument Against Science 2.0
Quite a number of extremely intelligent, insightful, and innovative scientists have been discussing the idea of open science and/or “Science 2.0″, generally meaning a more social approach to the practice of science. This has been going on for a number of years now.
Not FASTR Enough
While the publishing industry continues to explore numerous avenues for providing full Open Access to the stewarded versions-of-record of the scientific literature, SPARC once again offers up the hope that the US Congress will save us from the evil paywalls. Is this really the best they can do?T. Scott Blog
The Open Humanities Awards
Are you working with open data, open source or open content in the humanities?
Join the Open Humanities Award competition.
Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain
The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.The New York Times
Human Genome Project perspectives in 2013: webinar series
“Society needs a principle of genetic equity in some way or another. Genetic information should not be used–must not be used–to limit the equality between human beings….There are practical measures you can do. This equity is not just a philosophical term. It actually means statutory provisions so that people cannot be disadvantaged.”
The bug-hunters discovering new species in their spare time
Everyone knows there are lots of species yet to be discovered in rainforests and remote parts of the world. But hundreds are being discovered every year in Europe too - most of them by amateurs.BBC News.
Crowd sourcing knowledge on plants
This platform wants to create a community sharing information on how to grow plants and own food, open access and CC-lincensed.A new science radio station: “Science Studio”
A new science radio station called “Science Studio” got crowdfunded via Kickstarter. This station airs already published audios on science according to the practices introduced by “Best Online Science Writing” (formerly OpenLab).We’re looking for the best radio, podcasts, one-off recordings and anything else that talks about science. You can send us your favorite pieces, by you or by someone else. They should be no more than 20 minutes (excerpts from longer pieces are allowed), and should have been published in 2012. The nomination form is here.