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Open access dialog ‚Publish open access or perish?‘

Open access dialog 'Publish open access or perish?'

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) will give a combination of a symposium and a workshop on publish open access. Amsterdam, February, 6th 2013, 1-5pm. Registration is free.

After an introduction by Cameron Neylon (PLoS) and Martin Rasmussen (Copernicus Publications), participants will discuss several statements relating to open access of publications, in both small groups and in a plenary session. The aim of this KNAW open access dialog is to raise awareness of open access by discussing controversial statements. In this way, advantages and disadvantages of the various publication models as well as do’s and don’ts will be considered.

Open Data Bay Area

Open Data Bay Area

Open Data Bay Area calls itself “a group of thinkers, planners and doers meeting once a month to hear talks, get updated, spread news and meet other open data enthusiasts”.

Next meeting is on open web data, Speakers will be: Kurt Bollacker, a computer scientist currently pursuing research on long term digital archiving as the Digital Research Director at the Long Now Foundation, and Scott Robertson, founder of tri.vio. The meeting will be held November 27th, 2012 in San Francisco, 6-8pm. Location given only to members (login possible on website):

Though the talks will be especially interesting to engineers and data scientists, non-technical people will also enjoy them. Everyone is encourage to attend regardless of degree of technical skills.

Why all pharmaceutical research should be made open access

Why all pharmaceutical research should be made open access

The government wants to make all publicly funded research available – but the same must be demanded of pharmas also.

Cory Doctorow’s column series Digital Rights, Digital Wrongs for The Guardian.

Read also this blog entry on open access to all data from clinical trials by Tom Jefferson, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

This article on how open data can save money refers to Tom Jefferson’s blog entry advising that

pharmaceutical companies must release all the results of their clinical trials as open data, so that independent researchers can check what has been found.

The Denton Declaration as Open Data Manifesto invites to contribute by signing the declaration

The Denton Declaration as Open Data Manifesto invites to contribute by signing the declaration

Intentions of the Denton Declaration, a project initiated by Open Acces @ UNT, of the University of North Texas are:

  • A culture of openness in research.
  • A federated model of archiving data to enable discoverability, transparency, and open access.
  • A robust and sustainable funding regime for research data management infrastructure (technical, policy, and human resources).
  • The development and adoption of metadata standards for research data.
  • Long-term access to data that supports published research outputs.
  • Support for researchers in negotiations with publishers to allow open access to research in repositories.
  • Recognition of researchers’ intellectual property in data and scholarly research outputs.

How to act against faked research in China

How to act against faked research in China

Shi-min Fang, who has just won the inaugural Maddox prize, announced by the British journal Nature and charity organization Sense about Science, on risking his life and libel writs to expose scientific misconduct in his native China.

“The majority of cases exposed are plagiarism, the exaggeration of academic credentials and faked research papers, which are endemic in China.” says Shi-min Fang in an interview refering to the question if dubious claims would be a big problem in China.

Does science need ‚open evaluation‘ in addition to ‚open access?‘

Does science need 'open evaluation' in addition to 'open access?'

Scientists, not publishers, are in the best position to develop a fair evaluation process for scientific papers. (…) “Peer reviews should be made public information, like the scientific papers themselves.” (says Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Univesity of Cambridge, UK).

Thomson Reuters announces its initiative to incorporate ORCID into its services.

Thomson Reuters announces its initiative to incorporate ORCID into its services.

The IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading provider of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced its initiative to incorporate ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifiers into its scientific and scholarly research offerings, ensuring that users of resources such as ResearcherID and ScholarOne Manuscripts are able to incorporate their unique IDs into the attribution and publishing process. The system provides a central registry of researchers across disciplines and geographic boundaries, connecting researchers to their research.

Thomson Reuters.

50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science

50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science

Dr. Douglas Fields draws out the dark sides of the shift currently happening in the publishing industry. 

Newsweek is dead. But we have Twitter. Harper-Collins just closed its last warehouse of books in the United States. Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher of scholarly books and journals in the world, printing continuously since 1584, ceased printing operations this year and will outsource printing to another company. The Press survived tumultuous changes since the Middle Ages — the coming and going of plagues, the rise and fall of empires, wars and famine — but it could not sustain itself in the new environment of digital publication and self-publication that the electronic medium feeds.

Dr. Douglas Fields. Huff Post. Science. The Blog. 

See also the comments by Björn Brembs, declaring that Fields is wrong on open access.

Please have a look at this post by Jalees Rehman, cell biologist and as a physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), too.

Chocolate Makes You Smarter, So You Stop Reading BBC News

Chocolate Makes You Smarter, So You Stop Reading BBC News

It’s not really about chocolate, it’s about statistics.

Probability inversion is one of the nastiest mistakes one can do handling the results of a statistical analysis, invalidating to the roots the interpretation of the data to the point that the whole work effectively becomes useless. Unfortunately, it is a very common entertainment for journalists reporting scientific results, and oftentimes scientists themselves fall in the trap.

Tommaso Dorigo. Science 2.0.

Building an Innovation-Based Economy by improved knowledge transmission and commercialized knowledge?

Building an Innovation-Based Economy by improved knowledge transmission and commercialized knowledge?

We should ensure that local, state, and federal government procurement processes are fair, open, and transparent so that public agencies get the best products at the lowest possible prices.

Read whole paper by Darrell West, Allan Friedman, and Walter Valdivia, all working for Brookings Institution.

Should the internet get controlled by telecommunication firms?

Should the internet get controlled by telecommunication firms?

U.S. telecommunication giant Verizon tries to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Open Internet Rules by having a constitutional claims for the right to edit the internet pending at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

If Verizon’s current assertions were allowed to prevail, the consequences for American society and our economy would be very grave. Every aspect of business and social conduct increasingly depends on access to information and collaboration on the Internet. 

Sharing Discoveries More Efficient, More Honorable Than Patenting Them

Sharing Discoveries More Efficient, More Honorable Than Patenting Them

More efficient. More honorable. It’s a small example of the potential destruction for both prongs of the pro-patent argument. If it makes science more efficient to not patent, there goes promoting the progress. If it’s more honorable, there goes the moral argument. And, unlike some pharma companies, I’m not even going to make patents the key point here: Jay Bradner’s focus is on helping people.

Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project

Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project

The Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project asks for public comment on the draft  data release policy concerning Medtronic Clinical Trial Data.

Feedback will be accepted through 11:59 pm ET Saturday, December 15, 2012. All comments will be taken into consideration but incorporated at the discretion of the YODA team. Neither submitted comments nor response by the YODA Project to submitted comments will be publicly posted at the conclusion of the comment period.

See also draft.

18 visions for the future of scientific publishing

18 visions for the future of scientific publishing

Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Alexander Walther, both working at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK and Diana Deca, of the Institute of Neuroscience, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany, on open evaluation as next step of scientific publishing:

Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community, and thus the very course of science. (…) Evaluation, therefore, is at the heart of the entire endeavor of science. As the number of scientific publications explodes, evaluation, and selection will only gain importance. A grand challenge of our time, therefore, is to design the future system, by which we evaluate papers and decide which ones deserve broad attention and deep reading. However, it is unclear how exactly OE and the future system for scientific publishing should work. This motivated us to edit the Research Topic “Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review” in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. The Research Topic includes 18 papers, each going beyond mere criticism of the status quo and laying out a detailed vision for the ideal future system. The authors are from a wide variety of disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, medicine, molecular biology, chemistry, and economics.

Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 1: what actually is Open Access?

Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 1: what actually is Open Access?

Mike Taylor, Computer programmer with Index Data and palaeontologist with the University of Bristol, gives a definition on Open Access and notes that 

the biggest issues that derails constructive discussion of the move to OA is that the term is used in different ways by different groups.

See also part 2: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 2: Gold and Green.

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Need for access to academic knowledge is an open and shut case

Need for access to academic knowledge is an open and shut case

ACCESS barriers to published research “result in critical, relevant knowledge and research outputs in Africa being published in overseas journals — journals that are not affordable to African academic libraries”, Science and Technology Minister Derek Hanekom said at the Berlin 10 Open Access Conference last week.

BusinessDayLive.