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.

Open Access Week kicks off for the fourth time tomorrow with events across the globe. I was honoured to be asked to contribute to the SPARC video that will be released tomorrow. The following are a transcription of my notes – not quite what I said but similar.

Richard Stallman and Richard Grant, two people who I wouldn’t ever have expected to group together except based on their first name, have recently published articles that have made me think about what we mean when we talk about “Open” stuff. Stallman argues that the word “open” is limiting and misleading. But I feel the same way in many ways about “free”. Richard Grant’s piece probes the problems of making services open-access, making precisely the point that they are not free. Clearly they are not, and pretending they are is a dangerous way to justify access and accessibility. For me, it is a question of how best to invest to maximise your return.

Last Thursday night I was privileged to be invited to the 10th anniversary celebrations for BioMedCentral and to help announce and give the first BMC Open Data Prize. Peter Murray-Rust has written about the night and the contribution of Vitek Tracz to the Open Access movement. Here I want to focus on the prize we gave, the rationale behind it, and the (difficult!) process we went through to select a winner.

I had the great pleasure and privilege of announcing the launch of the Panton Principles at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest on Saturday. The Panton Principles aim to articulate a view of what best practice should be with respect to data publication for science. Where we found agreement was that for science, and for scientific data, and particularly science funded by public investment, that the public domain was the best approach and that we would all recommend it.

I’ve avoided writing about the Climate Research Unit emails leak for a number of reasons. Firstly it is clearly a sensitive issue with personal ramifications for some and for many others just a very highly charged issue. Probably more importantly I simply haven’t had the time or energy to look into the documents myself. I haven’t, as it were, examined the raw data for myself, only other people’s interpretations. So I’ll try to stick to a very general issue here.
There are appear to be broadly two responses from the research …

There has been a lot of recent discussion about the relative importance of Open Source and Open Data (Friendfeed, Egon Willighagen, Ian Davis). I don’t fancy recapitulating the whole argument but following a discussion on Twitter with Glyn Moody this morning [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] I think there is a way of looking at this with a slightly different perspective. But first a short digression.
I attended a workshop late last year on Open Science run by the Open Knowledge Foundation. I spent a significant part of …

It’s been an interesting week or so in the Chemistry online world. Following on from my musings about data services and the preparation I was doing for a talk the week before last I asked Tony Williams whether it was possible to embed spectra from ChemSpider on a generic web page in the same way that you would embed a YouTube video, Flickr picture, or Slideshare presentation. The idea is that if there are services out on the cloud that make it easier to put some rich material in your …

Yesterday on the train I had a most remarkable experience of synchronicity. I had been at the RIN workshop on the costs of scholarly publishing (more on that later) in London and was heading of to Oxford for a group dinner. On the train I was looking for a seat with a desk and took one up opposite a guy with a slightly battered looking mac laptop. As I pulled out my new Macbook (13” 2.4 GHz, 4 Gb memory since you ask) he leaned across to have a good …

The third installment of the paper (first part, second part) where I discuss social issues around practicing more Open Science.
Scientists are inherently rather conservative in their adoption of new approaches and tools. A conservative approach has served the community well in the process of sifting ideas and claims; this approach is well summarised by the aphorism ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. New methodologies and tools often struggle to be accepted until the evidence of their superiority is overwhelming. It is therefore unreasonable to expect the rapid adoption of new web …