Nature has announced a press release about a new scheme they’ve come up with to legalise begging to view research.

Just a quick post to congratulate the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their fabulous new research policy covering both open access & open data. One of the key things they’ve implemented for 2017 is ZERO TOLERANCE for post-publication embargoes of research. Work MUST be made openly available IMMEDIATELY upon publication to be compliant. No ifs, no buts. Let’s just remind ourselves why other major research funders like RCUK &

Day 0 of OpenCon started with me missing the pre-conference drinks reception because my flight from Chicago was delayed by 2 hours. I got into Washington, D.C. (DCA) at about midnight & then had to wait half an hour for a blue line train to take me the short distance from the airport to the conference hotel — I’m a diehard for public transport! Finally arriving at the hotel past 1 o’clock in the morning. Not a great start.

[UPDATE: 2015-01-07 It appears the full text of this article is now freely available from the publishers website. A moving wall system? This still doesn’t change the fact that this article was not publically available for 12 months. The maximum embargo allowed by MRC funding is just 6 months from publication.] I note with interest that article publication charge data from the University of Edinburgh has been released on Figshare today.

How best to link the figure, to the paper & the underlying data? Whilst visiting EBI, Hinxton yesterday, Robert Hanson (computational chemist) reminded me of an interesting hack you can do to embed data in images. Back in 2010 it was widely reported that people were using Flickr to transmit data (secretly) in images.

A quick blog from Meise, Belgium at the Pro-iBiosphere wrap-up event. Yesterday I gave a talk about my progress liberating, and making searchable, OA figures from academic literature: Liberating OA figures from PDF to Flickr (a Pro-iBiosphere talk) from Ross Mounce I’ve had a lot of great feedback and interest in what I’m doing with this.

[Update: the conference itself will be in November, 2014 – this is just the first announcement!] I’m super excited to announce I’m part of the international organizing committee for OpenCon 2014:         You can read the official first press release about this event here: http://www.righttoresearch.org/act/opencon/announcement   here’s an excerpt from it:

I’m proud to announce an interesting public output from my BBSRC-funded postdoc project: PLUTo: Phyloinformatic Literature Unlocking Tools. Software for making published phyloinformatic data discoverable, open, and reusable

I’ve been invited to come in and have an informal chat about open access with the Linnean Society on March 24th this month. Particularly with regard to what is and what is not ‘open access’ in terms of Creative Commons licences. I write this blog post to spur on other advocates to try and encourage their society journals to use proper, open access compliant article licencing that facilitates rather than prevents text &

Today I received proof that Elsevier are also sending takedown notices to UK universities – asking them to takedown copies of their staff’s academic research papers, hosted on university webpages. The full text is further down this post (in red). It is not just Academia.edu, it is not just the University of Calgary, University of California-Irvine, or Harvard University.