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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.

Open Access Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences

In conjunction with the Open Access Futures event, the Impact blog put together its first eCollection –Open Access Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The collection delves deeper into many of the issues discussed at the event, as well as provides additional space for topics we may not have been able to suitably cover during the event. The panel sessions were video recorded and are available to watch here. Download the PDF of the eCollection.

mozilla Science Lab: Get Involved

The Science Lab is about growing the community around open research in the  sciences. Whether you’re a tool developer, bench scientist, or educator,  we’re here to help you learn, build, and connect to others working to  make the web work for science.

A Case Study in Closed Access

But the problems don't stop there. In the digital age, it is absurd that ordinary members of the public, such as healthcare professional and their patients, cannot access and compare the latest research quickly and cheaply in order to take better care of themselves and others.
 

Live Chat: The future of open access research and publishing

Panel of experts Friday 25 October from 12-2pm BST debates peer review, pay models, quality control and corruption. Join in via chat.
In this online discussion, we want to discuss the impact open access is having across the board in the higher education and publishing sectors, from researchers to universities, from libraries to the publishing giants. Here's what we're looking to discuss: • Quality control and peer review • Cost and corruption • Access and knowledge • "Publish or perish" attitude • Where now and what next?

The Netherlands: Publishing in Open Access increases usage and has no effect on book sales

 OAPEN-NL’s final report, published yesterday, gives recommendations for research funders, libraries, publishers and authors. (...) In total 50 academic books were published in Open Access with subsidy from NWO. (...) OAPEN-NL also gathered data of all 50 books to get an insight in the costs related to publishing academic books. Based on this research, publishing a monograph in the Netherlands costs an average of € 12,000. Roughly half of these costs are for the Open Access edition. Remaining costs regard printing and disseminating the paper version. These results are important for the funding of Open Access monographs in the Netherlands.

You are what you can access: Sharing and collaborative consumption online

Interesting article on sharing and collaborative consumption - unfortunately behind a paywall.
Sharing is a phenomenon as old as humankind, while collaborative consumption and the “sharing economy” are phenomena born of the Internet age. This paper compares sharing and collaborative consumption and finds that both are growing in popularity today. Examples are given and an assessment is made of the reasons for the current growth in these practices and their implications for businesses still using traditional models of sales and ownership. The old wisdom that we are what we own, may need modifying to consider forms of possession and uses that do not involve ownership.

Let’s be open about Open Access

Richard Poynder asks himself who is behind http://openscience.com/ and comes to a surprising conclusion:
At this point I thought it might be worth checking the Whois record for openscience.com. In doing so I discovered that the domain is in the name of De Gruyter, the Berlin-based legacy publisher, which had acquired Versita in January 2012.