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 …

In fact, we already see distinguished professors beginning to leave academic powerhouses such as Stanford, and deciding to teach online instead. Given this reality, it is clear that universities now face a deep challenge of reinventing themselves to suit the needs and methods of learning in the digital age. 

Since the protest began, more than 4,800 researchers from all fields have joined in; about 20% are mathematicians. After an initial burst of activity, the petition is now attracting around 200 new signatories each day.

If networked science is to reach its potential, scientists will have to embrace and reward the open sharing of all forms of scientific knowledge, not just traditional journal publication. Networked science must be open science. But how to get there?

TEDx talk by Michael Nielsen on Open Science.

Interesting article on the Elsevier boycott.

Elsevier insists it is being misrepresented. The firm is certainly in rude financial health. In 2010 it made a £724m ($1.16 billion) profit on revenues of £2 billion, a margin of 36%. But it charges average industry prices for its products, according to Nick Fowler, its director of global academic relations, and its price rises have been lower than those imposed by other publishers over the past few years. Elsevier’s enviable margins, Dr Fowler says, are simply a consequence of the firm’s efficient operation.

“efficient operation …”

Adds up to a stunning 128.780,12 €.