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[19 Jul 2011 | 3 Comments | 265 views]
(S)low impact research and the importance of open in maximising re-use

This is an edited version of the text that I spoke from at the Altmetrics Workshop in Koblenz in June. Impact as re-use and the way it enables us to reframe the argument around the impact and dissemination of curiosity driven research.

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[17 Jul 2011 | One Comment | 373 views]
Wears the passion? Yes it does rather…

Quite some months ago an article in Cancer Therapy and Biology by Scott Kern of Johns Hopkins kicked up an almighty online stink. The article entitled “Where’s the passion” bemoaned the lack of hard core dedication amongst the younger researchers that the author saw around him. This article got a lot of people very …

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[13 Jul 2011 | 4 Comments | 482 views]
How to waste public money in one easy step…

Peter Murray-Rust has sparked off another round in the discussion of the value that publishers bring to the scholarly communication game and told a particular story of woe and pain inflicted by the incumbent publishers. On the day he posted that I had my own experience of just how inefficient and ineffective our communication …

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[23 Apr 2011 | 6 Comments | 877 views]
Michael Nielsen, the credit economy, and open science

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 …

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[6 Apr 2011 | 2 Comments | 1,037 views]
Best practice in Science and Coding. Holding up a mirror.

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.

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[21 Mar 2011 | One Comment | 249 views]
A return to “bursty work”

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 …

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[16 Mar 2011 | One Comment | 490 views]
Open Source, Open Research and Open Review

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 …

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[8 Mar 2011 | 5 Comments | 1,572 views]
Reforming Peer Review. What are the practical steps?

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 …

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[6 Feb 2011 | 13 Comments | 682 views]
Tweeting the lab

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 …

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[25 Jan 2011 | 16 Comments | 1,344 views]
What is it with researchers and peer review? or; Why misquoting Churchill does not an argument make

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 …