Articles tagged with: open access
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In my last post on scholarly publishers that support the US Congress SOPA bill I ended up making a series of edits. It was pointed out to me that the Macmillan listed as a supporter is not the Macmillan that is the parent group of Nature Publishing Group but a separate U.S. subsidiary of the same ultimate holding company, Holtzbrinck. As I dug further it became clear that while only a small number of scholarly publishers were explicitly and publicly supporting SOPA, many of them are members of the Association …
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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.
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Michael Nielsen’s talk at Science Online was a real eye opener for many of us who have been advocating for change in research practice. He framed the whole challenge of change as an example of a well known problem, that of collective action. So how do we take this view and use it to effect the changes we want to see in research practice? And are we prepared to address our own collective action problem and place the overall goals above our own projects and approaches?
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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.
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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.
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Peter Murray-Rust has sparked off another round in the discussion of the value that publishers bring to the scholarly communication game and told a particular story of woe and pain inflicted by the incumbent publishers. On the day he posted that I had my own experience of just how inefficient and ineffective our communication systems are by wasting the better part of the day trying to find some information. I thought it might be fun to encourage people to post their own stories of problems and frustrations with access to the literature and the downstream issues that creates, so here is mine.
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“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The three organisations aim to establish a new journal that will attract and define the very best research publications from across these fields. All research published in the journal will make highly significant contributions that will extend the boundaries of scientific knowledge…”
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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 …
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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.