Imagine there was a disease, with often devastating consequences, the causative agent of which remains elusive. Then, a paper is published identifying such a potential virus, causing great rejoicing especially among patient advocacy groups, who have struggled to convince medics that the disease is a real one–that is, not only psychosomatic. They have hope now…
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. –William Blake Peter Lawrence has weighed into the debate on the state of research in an article for Lab Times, boldly…
Open source, open access, open posters even–but open science? Is that a step too far? The arguments over whether open data–publishing experimental results on the web, making datasets available, etc.–is a good thing, for science as a whole or individual careers, are likely to rage for quite a long time to come. That hasn’t stopped…
The BBC reports that life expectancy is on the rise in the UK–despite all those pies, chips and beer. It cites a paper by David Leon of the London School of hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the International Journal of Epidemiology, Trends in European life expectancy: a salutary view (open access: 10.1093/ije/dyr061). While I’m not…
Via a tweet from Chris Surridge (Chief Editor and Associate Publisher, Nature Protocols) I found Richard Poynder‘s potted history of PLoS ONE. Fair warning though: that link goes to a short teaser; the full, 42-page analysis is available as a PDF. So no, I haven’t read it all.
Here’s the concluding part of the interview with Peter Murray-Rust at the University of Cambridge. We talked a bit about publishing data, and indeed science as a whole: where open data started for Peter was when he suggested all science should be published as supplemental data. Taking such a suggestion forward, the problem then becomes…
Our good friend Nando Boero, to whom thanks are due for introducing us to Ray Troll, has evaluated another paper. This one is four years old and hidden away in Oikos, and has the intriguing title How to write consistently boring scientific literature1. Kaj Sand-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen has ten key tips for…
It’s no big secret that we’re not fans of the journal impact factor. So it’s possibly justified to feel a little smug that overstating conclusions of research is positively correlated with impact factor.
In this second of three videos featuring Peter Murray-Rust, from the Chemistry Department of the University of Cambridge, recorded at the Panton Arms, I ask him if he has faced any opposition to the concept of open data. Peter is more concerned about the dangers of partial publication, where in his words people want the…
If you’re following the right people on Twitter you might notice a peculiar hashtag: #beyondthePDF. This refers to a workshop at UCSD, which has the goal to identify a set of requirements, and a group of willing participants to develop open source code to accelerate scientific knowledge sharing (H/T Martin Fenner).
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