Github for science sounds like a great plan? But do we have the underlying stack of equivalent services needed to provide “http for science” and “tcp/ip” for science. I argue that until we do we will struggle to really deliver on the excitement that examples (rightly) inspire.

A few weeks ago I attended a workshop run by the ESRC Genomics Forum in Edinburgh which brought together humanists, social scientists, and science focused folks. I was especially interested in the comments of Marina Levina on citizenship. In particular she asked the question “what are the civic responsibilities of a network citizen?”

Understanding how a process looks from outside our own echo chamber can be useful. It helps to calibrate and sanity check our own responses. It adds an external perspective and at its best can save us from our own overly fixed ideas. In the case of the ongoing Elsevier Boycott we even have a …

Ten years ago today, the Budapest Declaration was published. The declaration was the output of a meeting held some months earlier, largely through the efforts of Melissa Hagemann, that brought together key players from the, then nascent, Open Access movement. BioMedCentral had been publishing for a year or so, PLoS existed as an open …

Mike Taylor has a parable on the Guardian Blog about research communication and I thought it might be useful to share one that I have been using in talks recently. For me it illustrates just how silly the situation is, and how hard it is to break out of the mindset of renting access …

Prior to all the nonsense with the Research Works Act, I had been having a discussion with Heather Morrison about licenses and Open Access and peripherally the principle of requiring specific licenses of authors. I realized then that I needed to lay out the background thinking that leads me to where I am. There …

When the history of the Research Works Act, and the reaction against it, is written that history will point at the factors that allowed smart people with significant marketing experience to walk with their eyes wide open into the teeth of a storm that thousands of people would have predicted with complete confidence. That …

Response to Request for Information – FR Doc. 2011-28621

Dr Cameron Neylon – U.K. based research scientist writing in a personal capacity

Introduction

Thankyou for the opportunity to respond to this request for information and to the parallel RFI on access to scientific publications. Many of the higher level policy issues relating to data are covered in …

Response to Request for Information – FR Doc. 2011-28623

Dr Cameron Neylon – U.K. based research scientist writing in a personal capacity

Introduction

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to this request for information. As a researcher based in the United Kingdom and Europe, it might be argued that I have a conflict of interest. In …

Have you written your response to the OSTP RFIs yet? If not why not? This is amongst the best opportunities in years to directly tell the U.S. government how important Open Access to scientific publications is and how to start moving to a much more data centric research process. You’d better believe that the …