After sending a letter to my local MP, urging him to support the recommendations of the Hargreaves Report on Intellectual Property reform in parliament nearly a month ago (sent on the 17th June 2012) – I finally have a reply! Sadly, it’s not the reply I wanted. Don Foster does not appear willing to support the Early Day Motion on Intellectual Property law reform to further enable research, that I explicitly asked him to sign.
I sent my local MP (Don Foster, Lib Dem) a simple, fairly short (~265 words), clear & concise formal letter 18 days ago – I blogged the draft of it which is virtually the same here. It’s been at least 13 working days now by my count and I still haven’t received a proper reply, so I tweeted @DonFosterMP last night: http://storify.com/rmounce/hargreaves-edm
It’s that time again… time to write my monthly Panton Fellowship update. The trouble is, as I start writing this it’s 6am (London, UK). I arrived back from the Hennig XXXI meeting (University of California Riverside) after a long flight yesterday and am supremely jetlagged. I still can’t decide whether this is awesome (I can get more work done, by waking up earlier), or terrible as I can’t keep my eyes open past 9pm at night!
Taking inspiration from Cameron Neylon, I have written a DRAFT letter to my local MP urging him to support the recommendations in the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property. [UPDATE: Letter now sent :) ]
[A monthly update on my Panton Fellowship related activities] Last month I was slightly late with my monthly report, so this month I’m going to get things back on track and write my post now, on this leisurely sunny Sunday afternoon… It’s been a good month: First of all, I had the chance to speak about my Fellowship work for the Ede & Ravenscroft Prize final.
I have previously commented elsewhere on other blogs, that uniquely, with BOAI-compliant Open Access literature, one is able to re-distribute research however one wishes (provided proper attribution is given). I believe this to be hugely beneficial and perhaps a rather under-appreciated facet of the plurality of benefits offered by Open Access publishing.
If you haven’t heard yet – I was successful in my Panton Fellowship proposal I wasn’t the only successful applicant either – huge congratulations to Sophie Kershaw and her excellent proposal to train doctoral students how to do Open Science at Oxford University.
Yesterday, I dragged myself out of bed (it was a Saturday!) to go to my first ever ‘hackathon’. Thankfully it was a lot less geeky than it sounds – just a cosy little get together of people interested in Open Science, to work on things in a shared public space. Nick Stenning, Stefan Wehrmeyer, Jenny Molloy, Caspar Addyman and I all beavering away on our laptops at the Barbican Centre, later joined by surprise guest Todd Vision (Dryad &
This is a parody of a recent blog post over in Elsevier-land by David Tempest.
Research Councils UK (RCUK) – a partnership of seven core UK research funding bodies (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC), has recently released a very welcome draft policy document detailing their proposed Open Access mandate , for all research which they help fund.