The Research Data Management movement is moving on apace. Tools are working and adoption is growing. Policy development is starting to back up the use of those tools and there are some big ambitious goals set out for the next few years. But has the RDM movement taken the vision of data intensive research to its heart? Does the collection, sharing, and analysis of data about research data management meet our own standards? And is policy development based on and assessed against that data? Can we be credible if it is not?

Michael Nielsen’s talk at Science Online was a real eye opener for many of us who have been advocating for change in research practice. He framed the whole challenge of change as an example of a well known problem, that of collective action. So how do we take this view and use it to effect the changes we want to see in research practice? And are we prepared to address our own collective action problem and place the overall goals above our own projects and approaches?

While there has been a lot of talk about data repositories and data publication there remains a real lack of good tools that are truly attractive to research scientists and also provide a route to more general and effective data sharing. Here I explore how a data repository system might be immediately attractive to researchers and what that means about design and driving uptake.

Science Online London ran late last week and into the weekend and I was very pleased to be asked to run a panel, broadly speaking focused on evaluation and incentives. Now I had thought that the panel went pretty well but I’d be fibbing if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed with the audience reaction. Here I want to try and explain why the session was about incentives and what can really be done to make online science more valued. Because what I heard really excited me in terms of the opportunities for making that case and changing the conduct of science in general.

The Royal Society is running a public consultation exercise on Science as a Public Enterprise. Submissions are requested to answer a set of questions. Here are my answers. This is not the first time that the research community has faced this issue. Indeed it is not even the first time the Royal Society has played a central role. The precursors of the Royal Society played a key role in persuading the community that effective sharing of their research outputs would improve research. The development of journals and the development of a values system that demanded that results be made public took time and leadership. It is to be hoped that we tackle those challenges and opportunities with the same sense of purpose.

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.

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 mad. And it got me mad, but for a somewhat different reason.

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 systems are by wasting the better part of the day trying to find some information. I thought it might be fun to encourage people to post their own stories of problems and frustrations with access to the literature and the downstream issues that creates, so here is mine.

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.