From the figshare blog:
Sorry, we couldn’t resist the title, but we also realise the irony given the general failure of the attempts to build a “facebook for Scientists”. But scientists dont necessarily need a facebook, they have facebook. So why would scientists need a YouTube?
Here are some thoughts by Michael Eisen on publishers.
But one part of the letter really caught my eye:
[FRPAA] would also compel American taxpayers to subsidize the acquisition of important research information by foreign governments and corporations that compete in global markets with the public and private scientific enterprises conducted in the United States.COME ON! This one sentence exposes the publishers who wrote and signed the letter either as racist idiots who have no clue about how science works and what its goals are, or as craven liars willing to trot out xenophobic claptrap to promote their agenda.
Here a highlight from two separate interviews with Tim Gowers and Tyler Neylon. The article provides some background info on how the boycott came to life.
Q: When did you become an advocate for a change in the journal publishing system, and for Open Access?
Neylon: I have two major interests: math research and software. With both, you are aware of how easy it is to disseminate information on the Internet. Throughout my career I have been painfully aware of the inefficiency of scholarly publishing. If you know what technology can do, you are always seeing better ways of doing things. When I left NYU, it got harder for me to access research. I either had to sneak into, or pay $500 per year for access to an academic library. You shouldn’t have to pay if researchers don’t want you to pay.
Q: Who is responding to the boycott?
Neylon: The vast majority are professors at good universities. The most are in math, about 20 percent.
Q: Why are most in math?Neylon: People in math are particularly done with Elsevier. There were many resignations from their editorial boards. Mathematicians hate drama. To get a mathematician to resign, something must be seriously wrong.
Here is a piece by Kevin Smith discussing what scholars can do to change copyright. Smith starts off by reviewing last weeks news on Elsevier and provides three paths that scholars might pursue regarding Elsevier.
It has been an extraordinary week for open access advocates, and it is only Wednesday! For those keeping score, here is a recap of events, along with some commentary.
Here is a Washington Times article on the Elsevier boycott. They label it a “white-coat revolution”.
In 2012, making sense of big data through narrative and context, particularly unstructured data, will be a central goal for data scientists around the world, whether they work in newsrooms, Wall Street or Silicon Valley.
Here is a link to:
Whyte, A., Pryor, G. (2011). Open Science in Practice: Researcher Perspectives and Participation. The International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol. 6(1): 199–213.
From the abstract:
We report on an exploratory study consisting of brief case studies in selected disciplines, examining what motivates researchers to work (or want to work) in an open manner with regard to their data, results and protocols, and whether advantages are delivered by working in this way. We review the policy background to open science, and literature on the benefits attributed to open data, considering how these relate to curation and to questions of who participates in science.
This WSJ article is a couple of days old, but I never linked to it. It presents some of the stories people keep mentioning on citizen science. So here we go …
Several publishers of scientific journals are upset about an important service provided by the ETH-Bibliothek: the electronic document delivery service. The Director of the ETH-Bibliothek, Wolfram Neubauer, gives his view on the legal dispute.
At Elsevier, we have always focused on serving the global research community and ensuring the best possible access to research publications and data. In recent weeks, our support for the Research Works Act has caused some in the community to question that commitment.
Now that’s a way to put it.
Here is a piece by Paul Knoepfler on the “Research Works Act”.
In other words, the bill would block Americans’ access to the papers describing the scientific work that the taxpayers paid for in order to give publishers a free pass for millions of dollars.
Here is a piece by Robert Reddick.
This week I attended the @boraz lecture at UNC-Charlotte, and the debate-topic of Open Science was in the air. After some thought, and an email composition to Bora, I decided I would add to the public debate. First off, while I’m hardly even a citizen-scientist – my goal here is to offer, as best I can, a software-industry perspective on the important mission of Open Science.
Here is a piece by Anthony Salvagno on publishing and the peer-review system. What’s probably more interesting is the debate in the comments. From the comments:
Peer-review is intended to evaluate the validity of the scientific methods used and the conclusions made, while providing feed-back to improve the manuscript. While I agree that the current journal-based system is inadequate in today’s research and internet based environment, I do not believe that the system can, at this time, be forgone completely.
Wired’s David Dobbs shares his view on the Elsevier Boycott.
Here is a piece by Katarina Lovrecic on altmetrics summing up the recent debate on the issue.
Altmetrics Correlations: We need to think about n-dimensional impact space.
Ince, D.C., Hatton, L., Graham-Cumming, J. (2012). The case for open computer programs. Nature 482, 485–488.
Comprehensive nature article on open computer programs in science. From the abstract:
Scientific communication relies on evidence that cannot be entirely included in publications, but the rise of computational science has added a new layer of inaccessibility. Although it is now accepted that data should be made available on request, the current regulations regarding the availability of software are inconsistent. We argue that, with some exceptions, anything less than the release of source programs is intolerable for results that depend on computation.
Here are some thoughts on altmetrics by Jenny Delasalle.
The problem with web stats and altmetrics is that there are potentially a lot of sources which will all measure the stats for different versions of the same item, or different elements of the same output, in different ways. This sort of thing is a driver for publication in an open access (OA) journal with one canonical copy of an article in just one place online: the so called “gold” route to OA.
It’s a valid argument. One of the main reasons why impact factors are so heavily relied upon is caused by the fact that it is easy to argue against alternatives. The question then is what does a download count say about a paper? Very little I guess. It just indicates how many people have looked at it—it does not say anything about the quality of the content. This assessment can hardly be automated; a crowdsourced solution is probably more feasible.
Here is an open letter on open access by Stephen Curry.
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.