Yesterday David Willetts, the UK Science and Universities Minister gave a speech to the Publishers Association that has got wide coverage. However it is worth pulling apart both the speech and the accompanying opinion piece from the Guardian because there are some interesting elements in there, and also some things have got a little confused.
The first really key point is that there is nothing new here. This is basically a re-announcement of the previous position from the December Innovation Strategy on moving towards a freely accessible literature and a more public announcement …

Response to Request for Information – FR Doc. 2011-28621
Dr Cameron Neylon – U.K. based research scientist writing in a personal capacity
Introduction
Thankyou for the opportunity to respond to this request for information and to the parallel RFI on access to scientific publications. Many of the higher level policy issues relating to data are covered in my response to the other RFI and I refer to that response where appropriate here. Specifically I re-iterate my point that a focus on IP in the publication is a non-productive approach. Rather it is more …

Have you written your response to the OSTP RFIs yet? If not why not? This is amongst the best opportunities in years to directly tell the U.S. government how important Open Access to scientific publications is and how to start moving to a much more data centric research process. You’d better believe that the forces of stasis, inertia, and vested interests are getting their responses in. They need to be answered.
I’ve written mine on public access and you can read and comment on it here. I will submit it tomorrow …

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?

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.

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 …

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.