Just a quick note that BMC journal APC’s have increased from what they were in 2012.   Luckily I had the 2012 data saved on my computer so I can compare prices directly. I’ve put the data for 97 journals (not all of them) here on figshare. The mean price increase is just over 5% . Although to give it a fair statistical treatment – the median price increase is just 3.3% (to 1 d.p.). There is a lot of variance.

Why is it so difficult to identify academic publisher PDFs?   With published MP3 files of *audio *you get rather good metadata. Take for example an MP3 file I downloaded from Hacker Public Radio available at the bottom of this post.

I’m proud to announce I have a new article over at Palaeontology [Online] Posts at ‘P [O]’ are primarily aimed at public-engagement and since the site was launched back in July 2011, with sponsorship and support from the Palaeontology Association, one post per month has been featured on site. This month [December], I’ve written a rather different type of post for them.

A couple of days ago I posted specifically about the data re-use session. I’m going to use this post to muse about the conference more generally. About SpotOn London 2012 It used to be called Science Online London – an informative, sensible and appropriate name. This year I hear (rumours) that it had to change name to SpotOn because Science AAAS or some other litigious entity was claiming brand identity infringement.

So there’s been a few already: SpotOn day 1 &

An interesting move from Nature Publishing Group today… In a press release dated 7 November 2012 they’ve announced they’re allowing the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to be applied to articles in some (but not all) of their journals, specifically citing Wellcome Trust and RCUK policies that now require their funded authors to publish Gold OA with a CC BY license (or alternatively to use the Green OA route), recognizing that more

Recently I had the opportunity to collaborate on an extremely timely paper on data sharing and data re-use in phylogenetics, as part of the continuing MIAPA (Minimal Information for a Phylogenetic Analysis) working group project:

I just submitted some comments to SPARC / PLOS / OASPA’s request for public comment on their new HowOpenIsIt? material here. If you haven’t done so yourself, the deadline is TODAY 5pm (EST). Below are the comments I submitted. A mixture of praise for remembering to include machine-readability.

A few months ago I gave a short talk about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its activities as relevant to academics at a small (but good!) palaeontology conference in Cambridge (which I blogged about previously). I didn’t need to give this talk. Neither the OKF nor my academic progression required me to give this talk.

Wow! Where to begin… In this post I shall attempt to summarise some of OKFestival 2012. Some Background: I had been to the Open Knowledge Conference last year (in Berlin), where I gave an invited talk on Open Palaeontology and met lots of brilliant people in the Open Science community like Bjoern Brembs, Cameron Neylon & Peter Murray-Rust.

I said I would make an update on Tuesday (today), so if I get this posted before midnight I will ( just ) have met that  goal… In this (minor) update I have: added: Ubiquity Press (great low cost option!), SPIE (scored for 1-column per page), SAGE Open, Frontiers, WileyOpenAccess, OxfordOpen (OUP hybrid option), GigaScience, Open Biology (Royal Society) added the label for: Pensoft (sincerest