I handed in my thesis not long ago, on Thursday 3rd October 2013. No idea when my viva is yet.

I’ve been rather preoccupied in the last few months hence the lack of blog posts. (Apologies!) Here’s a quick recap of some things I’ve done since July: Got married in China (in September) Successfully proposed that the Systematics Association (of which I’m a council member) should sign DORA Gave an invited talk on open science at an INNGE workshop at INTECOL 2013 Completed and handed-in my PhD thesis last Thursday!

Last Saturday I went to Hack4Ac – a hackday in London bringing together many sections of the academic community in pursuit of two goals: To demonstrate the value of the CC-BY licence within academia. We are interested in supporting innovations around and on top of the literature. To reach out to academics who are keen to learn or improve their programming skills to better their research.

This post was originally posted over at the LSE Impact blog where I was kindly invited to write on this theme by the Managing Editor. It’s a widely read platform and I hope it inspires some academics to upload more of their work for everyone to read and use Recently I tried to explain on twitter in a few tweets how everyone can take easy steps towards open scholarship with their own work.

This is a re-post, originally first blogged by myself on the Open Knowledge Foundation main blog here Recently Science Europe published a clear and concise position statement titled: Principles on the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications This is an extremely timely & important document that clarifies what governments and research funders should expect during the transition to open access.

This article is cross-posted from the main Open Knowledge Foundation blog, where I occasionally post. I realise I haven’t had time to post here on my own blog for over a month now(!), so I may well copy across a few more posts I’ve written for OKF. Here at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we know Open Science is tough, but ultimately rewarding. It requires courage & leadership to take the open path in science.

My final repost today (edited) from the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. It’s a little old, originally posted on the 16th of April, 2013 but I think it definitely deserves to be here on my blog as a record of my activities… So… it’s over.

So, the new RCUK open access policy is now in play… and guess what – there’s plenty of journals out there that are not accommodating it at the moment. Perhaps this is just out of ignorance? Perhaps this is an area where a little nudge from interested parties e.g. open access advocates, RCUK-funded academics, and other concerned people might help? With this aim I have just emailed the editorial board of the Taylor &

In the last 2 weeks I’ve given talks in Brussels & Amsterdam. The first one was given during a European Commission (Brussels) working group meeting on Text & Data Mining. There were perhaps only ~30 people in the room for that. The second presentation was given just a few days ago at Beyond The PDF 2 (#btpdf2) in Amsterdam.

I just got forwarded this email. (Names, Dates & email addresses have been removed or replaced). I’m extremely concerned about this and thus am republishing this email to draw attention to it. Wiley are really pushing their expensive hybrid Open Access option ‘Online Open’ that does not represent value for money in my opinion – it’s US$3000 for most journals which is rather a lot.