On Monday 30 May I gave evidence at a European Commission hearing on Access to Scientific Information. This is the text that I spoke from. Just to re-inforce my usual disclaimer I was not speaking on behalf of my employer but as an independent researcher.
We live in a world where there is more information available at the tips of our fingers than even existed 10 or 20 years ago. Much of what we use to evaluate research today was built in a world where the underlying data was difficult and …

Michael Nielsen is a good friend as well as being an inspiration to many of us in the Open Science community. I’ve been privileged to watch and in a small way to contribute to the development of his arguments and expertise over the years and I found the distillation of these years of effort into the talk that he recently gave at TEDxWaterloo entirely successful.I therefore have to admit to being somewhat nonplussed by GrrrlScientist’s assessment of the talk that “Dr Nielsen has missed — he certainly has not emphasised — the most obvious reason why the Open Science movement will not work: credit.”

The following is the text from which I spoke today at the .Astronomy conference…There’s a funny thing about the science and coding communities. Each seems to think that the other has all the answers.

What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of doing scientific research. One partly inspired by the modular building blocks approach of some of the best open source software projects but also by a view that there were tremendous efficiency gains to be found in enabling specialisation of researchers, groups, even institutes, while encouraging a shared technical and social infrastructure that would help people identify the right partners for the very specific tasks that they needed doing today. The problem of course is that science funding is not configured that way, a problem that is that bane of any core-facility manager’s existence. Maintaining a permanent expert staff via a hand to mouth existence of short term grants is tough. But the world is changing, a few weeks ago I got a query from a commercial partner interested in whether I could solve a specific problem. This is a small “virtual company” that aims to target the small scale, but potentially high value, innovations that larger players don’t have the flexibility to handle. Everything is outsourced, samples prepared and passed from contractor to contractor. This is the first real contact I’ve had with this kind of approach in the research space but maybe these ideas are starting to take hold.

One of the things we want the Open Research Computation journal to do is bring more of the transparency and open critique that characterises the best Open Source Software development processes into the scholarly peer review process. But you can talk about changing the way peer review works and you can actively do something about. Michael Barton and Hazel Barton have taken matters into their own hands and thrown the doors completely open. They have submitted a paper to ORC and in parallel asked the community on the BioStar site how the paper and software could be improved.

So my previous post on peer review hit a nerve. Actually all of my posts on peer review hit a nerve and create massive traffic spikes and I’m still really unsure why. The strength of feeling around peer review seems out of all proportion to both its importance and indeed the extent to which people understand how it works in practice across different disciplines. Nonetheless it is an important and serious issue and one that deserves serious consideration, both blue skies thinking and applied as it were. And it is the latter I will try to do here.

I’ve been interested for some time in capturing information and the context in which that information is created in the lab. The question of how to build an efficient and useable laboratory recording system is fundamentally one of how much information is necessary to record and how much of that can be recorded while bothering the researcher themselves as little as possible. The problem with sophisticated systems that can catch everything is that they break. The problem with simple systems is that they don’t provide enough structure to be useful. But a little structure with a simple framework, like twitter, might provide a route to getting a lot of useful information easy recorded for a lab record.

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about peer review, pre and post publication, and the somewhat bizarre attachment of research community to the traditional approaches. A news article in Nature tho, in which I am quoted seems to have really struck a nerve for many people. The context in which the quote is presented doesn’t really capture what I meant but I stand by the statement in isolation. I think there are two important things to tease out here, firstly a critical analysis of the problems and merits of peer review, and secondly a close look at how it could be improved, modified, or replaced. I think these merit separate posts so I’ll start here with the problems in our traditional approach.

I was honoured to talk at the symposium to celebrate Peter Murray-Rusts’ work. I didn’t want to give the usual kind of talk to this audience. I wanted to focus on what I think are the big risks and opportunities for the research community and why I believe that a focus on maximising research impact might be a way to bring the community together in a positive way. However I made my own point by inadvertently putting up a permissions slide that prohibited livestreaming, live blogging, and recording. By using a restrictive licence I very effectively reduced the potential impact of my talk about impact. The message is pretty clear. If you want to make a difference, use an open licence and give people permission to re-use your work. If you want to make no impact at all then restrictive licences are a great way to achieve that.

Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG? And why oh why does NPG keep insisting on a non-commercial licence? I think those merit separate posts so here I’m just going to deal with the big issue. And I think this is really big.