…although some are perhaps starting to see the problems that are going to arise.
Last week I spoke at a Question Time style event held at Oxford University and organised by Simon Benjamin and Victoria Watson called “The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing” featuring Tim Gowers (Cambridge), Victor Henning (Mendeley), Alison Mitchell (Nature Publishing Group), Alicia Wise (Elsevier), and Robert Winston (mainly in his role as TV talking head on science issues). You can get a feel for the proceedings from Lucy Pratt’s summary but I want to focus …

Prior to all the nonsense with the Research Works Act, I had been having a discussion with Heather Morrison about licenses and Open Access and peripherally the principle of requiring specific licenses of authors. I realized then that I needed to lay out the background thinking that leads me to where I am. There is little new here in any sense but it remains a perspective that very few people really get.

Dear Representatives Maloney and Issa,
I am writing to commend your strong commitment to the recognition of intellectual property contributions to research communication. As we move to a modern knowledge economy, supported by the technical capacity of the internet, it is crucial that we have clarity on the ownership of intellectual property arising from the federal investment in research. For the knowledge economy to work effectively it is crucial that all players receive fair recompense for the contribution of intellectual property that they make and the services that they provide.
As a …

On the 8th December David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Science, and announced new UK government strategies to develop innovation and research to support growth. key aspect for Open Access advocates was the section that discussed a wholesale move by the UK to an author pays system to freely accessible research literature but doesn’t refer to Open Access per se. I think this is missing a massive opportunity for Britain to take a serious lead in defining the future direction of scholarly communication.

Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG? And why oh why does NPG keep insisting on a non-commercial licence? I think those merit separate posts so here I’m just going to deal with the big issue. And I think this is really big.

I spend a lot of my time arguing that many of the problems in the research community are caused by journals. We have too many, they are an ineffective means of communicating the important bits of research, and as a filter they are inefficient and misleading. Today I am very happy to be publicly launching the call for papers for a new journal. How do I reconcile these two statements?

If we imagine what the specification for building a scholarly communications system would look like there are some fairly obvious things we would want it to enable. Registration of priority, archival, re-use and replication, and filtering. Some of these the current system can do well, some of them not so. Can thinking about how we would design a system from the ground up help us to think about what we can do today to build a better and more effective record?

The online maths community has lit up with excitement as a document, claiming to prove one of the major outstanding theorems in maths has been circulated. In response an online peer review process has swung into action that is very similar to the kind of post-publication peer review that many of us have advocated. Is this a one of, a special case? Or does it point the way towards successfully using the web to find a way of doing peer review effectively and efficiently?

The following is my contribution to a collection prepared by the British Library and released today at the Wellcome Trust, called “Driving UK Research. Is copyright a help or a hindrance?” which is being released under a CC-BY-NC license. The British Library kindly allowed authors to retain copyright on their contributions so I am here releasing the text into the public domain via a CCZero waiver.

I wrote a few weeks back about the idea of re-imagining the formally published scientific paper as an aggregation of objects. I asserted that the tools for achieving this are more or less in place. Actually that is only half true. The tools for storing, displaying, and even to some extent archiving communications in this form do exist, at least in the form of examples. But we still need authoring and publishing tools to make the overall vision work.