Today’s big news is that Crossref has acquired the Retraction Watch database of expressions of concerns and retractions and has made it openly accessible to anyone who wants to use it. I’m waiting for full confirmation of the license or public domain dedication under which it will be released, but this is still a great commitment of Crossref to the POSI principles. The liberation of this database is good for science and scholarship in general.
This morning I gave the third of my keynote talks this week at the Janeway conference: The Lower Decks. It’s been quite a week and I am exhausted with my kidney failure. Indeed, today is a macabre one year anniversary, precisely, since I had the kidney biopsy that revealed my BK Virus Nephropathy and that my kidneys were going to be totally destroyed. Of course, I didn’t know that quite at that time.
Well, it finally happened, as Queen once sang. But I am not going “slightly mad” as the song professes. Instead, I have decided that the time has come where I need a wheelchair to get around. My arthritic hip damage is substantial and painful – and it’s stopping me going places. I rarely want to go out anywhere “for a walk” because the pain is so great. A wheelchair will help with this. But there are some things about it that bother me.
Excel stores dates in a very odd way: a serial number of days since 1900.
In recent days, several signatories to the Principles on Open Scholarly Infrastructure have taken to performing self-audits of their compliance with the principles. Of course, holding oneself to account in this way is a welcome development. Without some form of self-appraisal it is not possible to know how close one is to fulfilling the goals of POSI.
It is sometimes easy, when discussing openness, to get bogged down in the technical weeds. People often want detail and specifics: what open license should I use? Precisely how much revenue do I need to keep in reserve safely to wind-down an organization? When does advocacy become lobbying?
As noted previously, I am vacating my martineve.com domain. To do so has been a painful process that involves changing every account that uses martin@martineve.com to a new email address. This is painful because it turned out to be about 350 accounts. Different sites categorise the email differently.
This is a quick note to say that, in the near future, I will be abandoning the martineve.com domain name. For quite some time now, the primary address for this blog and site has been https://eve.gd. I know that cool URLs don’t change. But I guess I am not totally cool.
I have read, with some dismay, the draft of Ithaka S+R’s most recent report. I offer here some critical remarks that I hope will allow for revision of the work, which I believe offers an insular, digital-nationalist, exclusionary vision for the future of scholarly communications. The views herein are my personal take, not those of any organization for which I work.
