Understanding how a process looks from outside our own echo chamber can be useful. It helps to calibrate and sanity check our own responses. It adds an external perspective and at its best can save us from our own overly fixed ideas. In the case of the ongoing Elsevier Boycott we even have a perspective that comes from two opposed directions.
When the history of the Research Works Act, and the reaction against it, is written that history will point at the factors that allowed smart people with significant marketing experience to walk with their eyes wide open into the teeth of a storm that thousands of people would have predicted with complete confidence. That story will detail two utterly incompatible world views of scholarly communication.
Response to Request for Information – FR Doc. 2011-28623 Dr Cameron Neylon – U.K. based research scientist writing in a personal capacity Introduction Thank you for the opportunity to respond to this request for information. As a researcher based in the United Kingdom and Europe, it might be argued that I have a conflict of interest. In some ways it is in my interest for U.S. federally funded research to be uncompetitive.
Dear Representatives Maloney and Issa, I am writing to commend your strong commitment to the recognition of intellectual property contributions to research communication. As we move to a modern knowledge economy, supported by the technical capacity of the internet, it is crucial that we have clarity on the ownership of intellectual property arising from the federal investment in research.
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.
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.
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. How do societies manage big changes when those changes often represent a disadvantage to many individuals, at least in the short term.
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. 1. What ethical and legal principles should govern access to research results and data?
This is an edited version of the text that I spoke from at the Altmetrics Workshop in Koblenz in June. There is also an audio recording of the talk I gave available as well as the submitted abstract for the workshop. I developed an interest in research evaluation as an advocate of open research process.
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…starting with: The point being that if they really cared, those young researchers would be there day in-day out working their hearts out to get to the key finding.