The following is a version of the text I spoke from at the STEPS 2015 Conference, Resource Politics, at a session on Open Science organised by Valleria Arza, where I spoke along with Ross Mounce and Cindy Regalado. This version is modified slightly in response to comments from the audience.
There aren’t too many privileged categories I don’t fall into. White, male, middle class, middle aged, home owner. Perhaps the only claim I could make in the UK context is not having a connection with Oxbridge. The only language I speak …

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 …

Michael Nielsen asked me to answer some questions about practical approaches to Open Science. You can see my answers up on his blog.

Image by dullhunk via Flickr

One of the great things about being invited to speak that people don’t often emphasise is that it gives you space and time to hear other people speak. And sometimes someone puts together a programme that means you just have to shift the rest of the world around to make sure you can get there. Lisa Green and Hope Leman have put together the biggest concentration of speakers in the Open Science space that I think I have ever seen for the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest …

Next Tuesday I’m giving a talk at the Institute for Science Ethics and Innovation in Manchester. This is a departure for me in terms of talk subjects, in as much as it is much more to do with policy and politics. I have struggled quite a bit with it so this is an effort to work it out on “paper”. Warning, it’s rather long. The title of the talk is “Open Research: What can we do? What should we do? And is there any point?”
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I’d like to start by explaining …

Issues surrounding the relationship of Open Research and replication seems to be the meme of the week. Abhishek Tiwari provided notes on a debate describing concerns about how open research could damage replication and Sabine Hossenfelder explored the same issue in a blog post. The concern fundamentally is that by providing more of the details of our research we may actually be damaging the research effort by reducing the motivation to reproduce published findings or worse, as Sabine suggests, encouraging group think and a lack of creative questioning.
I have to …

Yesterday I was privileged to be invited to give a talk at the NESTA Crucible Workshop being held in Lancaster. You can find the slides on slideshare. NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts,  is an interesting organization funded via a UK government endowment to support innovation and enterprise and more particularly the generation of a more innovative and entrepreneurial culture in the UK. Among the programmes it runs in pursuit of this is the Crucible program where a small group of young researchers, generally looking for …

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 …

This is an important discussion that has been going on in disparate places, but primarily at the moment is on the Open Science mailing list maintained by the OKF (see here for an archive of the relevant thread). To try and keep things together and because Yishay Mor asked, I thought I would try to summarize the current state of the debate.
The key aim here is to find a form of practice that will enhance data availability, and protect it into the future.
There is general agreement that there is a need for some sort of declaration associated …

I should be putting something together for the actual sessions I am notionally involved in helping running but this being a very interactive meeting perhaps it is better to leave things to very last minute. Currently I am at a hotel at LAX awaiting an early flight tomorrow morning. Daily temperatures in the LA area have been running around 25-30 C for the past few days but we’ve been threatened with the potential for well below zero in Chapel Hill. Nonetheless the programme and the people will more than make …