Like many people over the past week, and months, I’ve had some cause to reflect on what it is I do, and why. A lot of that circles around an issue that’s been troubling me for a while, how do you simultaneously acknowledge a personal and historical failure to act and credibly and coherently move to change that. How can I know when to challenge and when to shut up and listen – because its not always immediately obvious. There is perhaps a greater risk of challenging when it is …

Following one of “those” conversations on twitter, the ones where the 140 character limit just isn’t enough it seemed worth writing up a quick post. It’s that or follow the US election after all…
Richard Sever of Cold Spring Harbour Press posed the following question on:

Regardless of access, should there be a conversation about whether CC BY is the most appropriate license for images of patients? https://t.co/V3XpQ9jZSp
— Richard Sever (@cshperspectives) November 8, 2016

…to which my answer was:

@cshperspectives No, if an image shouldn't be distributed we need more granular upstream access controls and …

This a set of notes for my talk at Duke University this week. It draws on the Political Economy of Publishing series as well as other work I’ve been involved with by Jason Potts at RMIT amongst others. The title of the talk is “Sustainable Futures for Research Communication” and you can find the abstract at the Duke event page.
The video is now available along with the slides. The lecture capture didn’t get such a clear view of the slides so you may want to bring both up and play along.
Sustainability …

A couple of ideas have been rumbling along in the background for me for a while. Reproducibility and what it actually means or should mean has been the issue du jour for a while. As we revised the Excellence manuscript in response to comments and review reports, we also needed to dig a bit deeper into what it was that distinguishes the qualities of the concept of “soundness” from “excellence”. Are they both merely empty and local terms or is there something different about “proper scholarly practice” that we can use to …

The development of the acronym “FAIR” to describe open data was a stroke of genius. Standing for “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable” it describes four attributes of datasets that are aspirations to achieve machine readability and re-use for an open data world. The short hand description provided by four attributes as well as a familiar and friendly word have led to its adoption as a touchstone for funders and policy groups including the G20 Hangzhao Concensus, the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science, the NIH Data Commons and the European Open …

As part of the broader Open Science agenda of the European Commission an expert group on “altmetrics” has been formed. This group has a remit to consider how indicators of research performance can be used effectively to enhance the strategic goals of the commission and the risks and opportunities that new forms of data pose to the research enterprise. This is my personal submission. 
Next Generation Altmetrics
Submission by Cameron Neylon, Professor of Research Communications, Curtin University
1. Introduction
The European Commission has an ambitious program for Open Science as part of three aspirations, …