It has become rather fashionable in some circles to decry the complain about the lack of progress on Open Access. Particularly to decry the apparent failure of UK policies to move things forward. I’ve been guilty of frustration at various stages in the past and one thing I’ve always found useful is thinking back to where things were.

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 launch of the Panton Principles, many months after they were first suggested is really largely down to the work of Jonathan Gray.

There has been some debate going backwards and forwards over the past few weeks about licensing, peoples expectations, and the extent to which researchers can be expected to understand, or want to understand, the details of legal terms, licensing and other technical minutiae. It is reasonable for scientific researchers not to wish to get into the details.

So while on the train yesterday in somewhat pre-caffeinated state I stuck my foot in it somewhat. Several others have written (Nils Reinton, Bill Hooker, Jon Eisen, Hsien-Hsien Lei, Shirley Wu) on the unattributed use of an image that was put together by Ricardo Vidal for the DNA Network of blogs. The company that did this are selling hokum. No question of that.

Science commons and other are organising a workshop on Open Science issues as a satellite meeting of the European Science Open Forum meeting in July.

Image from Wikipedia via Zemanta Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality: There is a problem at the core of this. For someone to pay for access to the results, there has to be a monetary benefit to them.

One of the strong messages that came back from the workshop we held at the BioSysBio meeting was that protocols and standards of behaviour were something that people would appreciate having available. There are many potential issues that are raised by the idea of a ‘charter’ or ‘protocol’ for open science but these are definitely things that are worth talking about.