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 …

Suddenly it seems everyone wants to re-imagine scientific communication. From the ACS symposium a few weeks back to a PLoS Forum, via interesting conversations with a range of publishers, funders and scientists, it seems a lot of people are thinking much more seriously about how to make scientific communication more effective, more appropriate to …

I have long being sceptical of the costs and value delivered by our traditional methods of peer review. This is really on two fronts, firstly that the costs, where they have been estimated are extremely high, representing a multi-billion dollar subsidy by governments of the scholarly publishing industry. Secondly the value that is delivered …

I wouldn’t normally try to pick a fight with Chad Orzel, and certainly not over a post which I mostly agree with, but I wanted to take some issue with the slant in his relatively recent post We are science (see also a good discussion in the comments).  Chad makes a cogent argument that …

I hold no particular candle for traditional peer review. I think it is inefficient, poorly selective, self reinforcing, often poorly done, and above all, far too slow. However I also agree that it is the least worst system we have available to us.  Thus far, no other approaches have worked terribly well, at least …

This post is an opinion piece and not a rigorous objective analysis. It is fair to say that I am on the record as and advocate of the principles behind PLoS ONE and am also in favour of post publication peer review and this should be read in that light. [ed I’ve also modified …

This is the second in a series of posts (first one here) in which I am trying to process and collect ideas that came out of Scifoo. This post arises out of a discussion I had with Michael Eisen (UC Berkely) and Sean Eddy (HHMI Janelia Farm) at lunch on the Saturday. We had …

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Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality:
What is being generated here is new science, and science isn’t paid for per se. The …

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Once again a range of conversations in different places have collided in my feed reader. Over on Nature Networks, Martin Fenner posted on Researcher ID which lead to a discussion about attribution and in particular Martin’s comment that there was a need to be able to link to comments and the necessity …

Another post prompted by an exchange of comments on Neil Saunder’s blog. The discussion here started about the somewhat arbitrary nature of what does and does not get counted as ‘worthy contributions’ in the research community. Neil was commenting on an article in Nature Biotech that had similar subject matter to some Blog posts, …