Mike Taylor has a parable on the Guardian Blog about research communication and I thought it might be useful to share one that I have been using in talks recently. For me it illustrates just how silly the situation is, and how hard it is to break out of the mindset of renting access to content for the incumbent publishers. It also, perhaps, has a happier ending.

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 idea that “it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” combined with the traditional process of filtering scholarly communication by peer review prior to publication seems to be leading towards the idea that we need to build better filters by beefing up the curation of research output before it is published. Here I argue that this is backwards and that the ‘filter failure’ soundbite is maybe unfortunate in the context of scholarly communications. The web won’t reduce the cost of curation, but it has reduced the cost of publication. This means that instead of building filters to prevent stuff getting on the web it is more productive to focus on enhancing discovery. A focus on enabling discovery can both deliver for researchers and provide business models that are more aligned with the way the web works.

There has been an awful lot recently written and said about author-pays business models for scholarly publishing and a lot of it has focussed on PLoS ONE. Most recently Kent Andersen has written a piece on Scholarly Kitchen that contains a number of fairly serious misconceptions about the processes of PLoS ONE. This is a shame because I feel this has muddled the much more interesting question that was intended to be the focus of his piece. Nonetheless here I want to give a robust defence of author pays models and of PLoS ONE in particular.

Towards the end of last year I wrote up some initial reactions to the announcement of Nature Communications and the communications team at NPG were kind enough to do a Q&A to look at some of the issues and concerns I raised. Specifically I was concerned about two things. The licence that would be used for the “Open Access” option and the way that journal would be positioned in terms of “quality”, particularly as it related to the other NPG journals and the approach to peer review.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post looking at the announcement of Nature Communications, a new journal from Nature Publishing Group that will be online only and have an open access option. Grace Baynes, fromthe  NPG communications team kindly offered to get some of the questions raised in that piece answered and I am presenting my questions and the answers from NPG here in their complete form. I will leave any thoughts and comments on the answers for another post. There has also been more information from NPG available at the journal website since my original post, …

This is a case of a comment that got so long (and so late) that it probably merited it’s own post. David Crotty and Paul (Ling-Fung Tang) note some important caveats in comments on my last post about the idea of the “web native” lab notebook. I probably went a bit strong in that post with the idea of pushing content onto outside specialist services in my effort to try to explain the logic of the lab notebook as a feed. David notes an important point about any third part …