One of the things I wanted to do with the IDRC Data Sharing Pilot Project that we’ve just published was to try and demonstrate some best practice. This became more important as the project progressed and our focus on culture change developed. As I came to understand more deeply how much this process was one of showing by doing, for all parties, it became clear how crucial it was to make a best effort.
This turns out to be pretty hard. There are lots of tools out there to help with …

Open Access week is a fitting time to be finalising a project on Open Data. About two years ago I started working with the Canadian development funder, the International Development Research Center, to look at the implementation of Open Data policy. This week the final report for that project is being published.
Everyone, it seems agrees that opening up research data is a good thing, at least in the abstract. While there are lots of good reasons for not making data open in specific cases, its hard to make a case …

I’m not quite sure exactly what was the reason but there was a recent flare-up of the good old “how much does it cost to publish a scholarly article” discussion recently. Partly driven by the Guardian article from last month on the history of 20th century scholarly publishing. But really this conversation just rumbles along with a regular flare up when someone does a new calculation that comes to a new number, or some assertion is made about “value” by some stakeholder.
Probably the most sensible thing said in the most …

I’ve just read Lave and Wenger’s (1991) book Situated Learning on the recommendation of Isla Gershon. Like many books I’ve been reading this was radical in its time but reads in some ways to me today as common sense. It’s actually quite hard for me to reconstruct the world view in which this was seen as a dangerously radical departure.
The core of Lave and Wenger’s argument is that to understand learning we have to see the learner as a whole person in a web of relationships. They propose that a …

I had a twitter rant and a few people asked if I would convert it into a post. It also seemed worth preserving. This is a very lightly edited version of the thread that starts with this tweet.

I saw this thread last night about #openscience inclusion and diversity, and I'm not going looking for it again.
But here's my view. 1/n
— CⓐmeronNeylon (@CameronNeylon) August 10, 2017

The only thing that links all varying strands of open science (and open scholarship more generally) is inclusion and diversity as a first principle. The primary …

Following on from my post yesterday a couple of questions popped up about collective and collectivist models in scholarly communications. Richard Poynder is skeptical, which left me nonplussed because from where I sit what I described is happening all over the place. Funders are looking at investment strategies, collectives are forming and some of them are growing very rapidly. Which brings us to the second and more concrete question. How is it that things like Open Library of Humanities, a collective funding model for journal publishing, and similar models like …