I had a twitter rant and a few people asked if I would convert it into a post. It also seemed worth preserving. This is a very lightly edited version of the thread that starts with this tweet.

I saw this thread last night about #openscience inclusion and diversity, and I'm not going looking for it again.
But here's my view. 1/n
— CⓐmeronNeylon (@CameronNeylon) August 10, 2017

The only thing that links all varying strands of open science (and open scholarship more generally) is inclusion and diversity as a first principle. The primary …

Following on from my post yesterday a couple of questions popped up about collective and collectivist models in scholarly communications. Richard Poynder is skeptical, which left me nonplussed because from where I sit what I described is happening all over the place. Funders are looking at investment strategies, collectives are forming and some of them are growing very rapidly. Which brings us to the second and more concrete question. How is it that things like Open Library of Humanities, a collective funding model for journal publishing, and similar models like …

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 …

Over the past week this tweet was doing the rounds. I’m not sure where it comes from or precisely what its original context was, but it appeared in my feed from folks in various student analytics and big data crowds. The message I took was “measurement looks complicated until you pin it down”.
But what I took from this was something a bit different. Once upon a time the idea of temperature was a complex thing. It was subjective, people could reasonably disagree on whether today was hotter or colder than …

My normal practice is that nothing posted here has been seen or vetted by others. This post is a departure from that because I think it is important enough to justify whatever extra reach I can give it. This text, which has just been sent out to FORCE11 Members by email, was seen by the FORCE11 Board of Directors and the linked statement was approved by a board vote.
Dear Colleagues
Re: FORCE11 Board of Directors Statement on Restrictions to Immigration
FORCE11 works towards the goal of being a global platform that brings communities together …

 
This is the first draft of the second chapter of a book that I’m starting to work on. The initial draft of the first chapter is also posted here. My recent post on evolution was a first pass at exploring some of the ideas needed for later chapters. It’s 5,476 words incidentally so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I don’t think I would like to meet myself as a twenty year old. I was arrogant, sure of myself, concerned with where I was going. Of course all of this was …

It’s been a big weekend for poorly designed blacklists. But prior to this another blacklist was also a significant discussion. Beall’s list of so-called “Predatory” journals and publishers vanished from the web around a week ago. There is still not explanation for why, but the most obvious candidate is that legal action, threatened or real, was the cause of it being removed. Since it disappeared many listservs and groups have been asking what should be done? My answer is pretty simple. Absolutely nothing.
It won’t surprise anyone that I’ve never been …

There’s an article doing the rounds today about public understanding and rejection of experts and expertise. It was discussed in an article in the THES late last year (which ironically I haven’t read). I recommend reading the original article by Scharrer and co-workers, not least because the article itself is about how reading lay summaries can lead to a discounting of expertise. A lot of the reaction seems to be driven by two things. The first is a line in the introduction of the paper that the authors “share the normative position taken by …