This is a version of the paper I’ve had accepted for SciDataCon in a session on the sustainability of Research Data Infrastructures. It was also the basis for the session that I helped lead with Simon Coles at the Jisc-CNI meeting in mid-July in Oxford. The original version was quite short and skips over some of the background material and context. I’m hoping to work it up into a full paper at some point soon so any comments are welcome.
Summary
Infrastructures for data, such as repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards are …

Cite as “Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2016) Where are the pipes? Building Foundational Infrastructures for Future Services, retrieved [date], http://cameronneylon.net/blog/where-are-the-pipes-building-foundational-infrastructures-for-future-services/ ‎”
You probably don’t think too much about where all the services to your residence run. They go missing from view until something goes wrong. But how do we maintain them unless they are identified? An entire utilities industry, which must search for utility infrastructure, hangs in the balance on this knowledge. There’s even an annual competition, a rodeo no less, to crown the best infrastructure locators in the land, rewarding those …

Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a set of principles by which Open Infrastructures to support the research community could be run and sustained. – Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon

Three things come together to make this post. The first is the paper The 2.5% Commitment by David Lewis, which argues essentially for top slicing a percentage off library budgets to pay for shared infrastructures. There is much that I agree with in the paper, the need for resourcing infrastructure, the need for mechanisms to share that burden, and fundamentally the need to think about scholarly communications expenditures as investments. But I found myself disagreeing with the mechanism. What motivates me to getting around to writing this is the recent …

Open Access week is a fitting time to be finalising a project on Open Data. About two years ago I started working with the Canadian development funder, the International Development Research Center, to look at the implementation of Open Data policy. This week the final report for that project is being published.
Everyone, it seems agrees that opening up research data is a good thing, at least in the abstract. While there are lots of good reasons for not making data open in specific cases, its hard to make a case …

One of the things I find frustrating about discussions of economics in scholarly publishing is the way that discussions that are built around critique of capital models or neoliberalism are dismissed as impractical. Most recently Stuart Lawson’s interesting provocation, Against Capital, got a range of dismissive comments as being irrelevant because it required the overthrow of the capitalist system.
I find this, alongside another kind of response, most commonly from people in the business of scholarly publishing that such criticisms represent a failure to understand the financial realities of publishing, frustrating …

The following will come across as a rant. Which it is. But it’s a well intentioned rant. Please bear in mind that I care about good practice in data sharing, documentation, and preservation. I know there are many people working to support it, generally under-funded, often having to justify their existence to higher-ups who care more about the next Glam Mag article than whether there’s any evidence to support the findings. But, and its an important but, those political fights won’t become easier until researchers know those people exist, value …

This is my submitted paper to ElPub, a conference running in Cyprus over the next few days. I’m posting it here as a kind-of-preprint. Comments and thoughts are welcome. The version in the proceedings is available online as part of Chan and Loizides (eds) Expanding Perspectives on Open Science: Communities, Cultures and Diversity in Concepts and Practices.

Abstract
The debate over the meaning, and value, of open movements has intensified. The fear of co-option of various efforts from Open Access to Open Data is driving a reassessment and re-definition of what is …

This a set of notes for my talk at Duke University this week. It draws on the Political Economy of Publishing series as well as other work I’ve been involved with by Jason Potts at RMIT amongst others. The title of the talk is “Sustainable Futures for Research Communication” and you can find the abstract at the Duke event page.
The video is now available along with the slides. The lecture capture didn’t get such a clear view of the slides so you may want to bring both up and play along.
Sustainability …

As part of the broader Open Science agenda of the European Commission an expert group on “altmetrics” has been formed. This group has a remit to consider how indicators of research performance can be used effectively to enhance the strategic goals of the commission and the risks and opportunities that new forms of data pose to the research enterprise. This is my personal submission. 
Next Generation Altmetrics
Submission by Cameron Neylon, Professor of Research Communications, Curtin University
1. Introduction
The European Commission has an ambitious program for Open Science as part of three aspirations, …