The text of this was written before I saw Richard Poynder’s recent piece on PLoS ONE and the responses to that. Nothing in those really changes the views I express here but this text is not a direct response to those pieces. So my previous post on peer review hit a nerve. Actually all of my posts on peer review hit a nerve and create massive traffic spikes and I’m still really unsure why.

I’ve been interested for some time in capturing information and the context in which that information is created in the lab. The question of how to build an efficient and useable laboratory recording system is fundamentally one of how much information is necessary to record and how much of that can be recorded while bothering the researcher themselves as little as possible.

Image via Wikipedia I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about peer review, pre and post publication, and the attachment of the research community to traditional approaches. A news article in Nature though, in which I am quoted seems to have really struck a nerve for many people and has prompted me to actually write something.

Image via Wikipedia I was greatly honoured to be asked to speak at the symposium held on Monday to recognize Peter Murray-Rusts’ contribution to scholarly communication. The lineup was spectactular, the talks insightful and probing, and the discussion serious, but also no longer trapped in the naive yes/no discussions of openness and machine readability, but moving on into detail, edge cases, problems and issues.

Image via Wikipedia Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG?

Image by Aníbal Pées Labory via Flickr Long term readers of this blog will know that I occasionally write an incomprehensible post that no-one understands about the nature of time on the web. This is my latest attempt to sort my thinking out on the issue. I don’t hold out that much hope but it seemed appropriate for the New Year… 2010 was the year that real time came to the mainstream web.

I spend a lot of my time arguing that many of the problems in the research community are caused by journals. We have too many, they are an ineffective means of communicating the important bits of research, and as a filter they are inefficient and misleading. Today I am very happy to be publicly launching the call for papers for a new journal. How do I reconcile these two statements? Computation lies at the heart of all modern research.

In short succession a series of new initiatives have come out of Macmillan. From Nature Publishing Group a new protocol exchange, providing a space to share, collect, and refer to research protocols. The ones I’ve looked at so far are connected to published papers, in a similar manner to the way Nature Protocols works largely as a repository for detailed methods from papers in the Nature Stable.

Image via Wikipedia Last Friday I spoke at the STM Innovation Seminar in London, taking in general terms the theme I’ve been developing recently of focussing on enabling user discovery rather than providing central filtering, of enabling people to act as their own gatekeeper rather than publishers taking that role on for themselves.

Image via Wikipedia I know I’ve been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Mainly I’ve been away for work and having a brief holiday so it is good to be plunging back into things with some good news. I am very happy to report that the Open Society Institute has agreed to fund the proposal that was built up in response to my initial suggestion a month or so ago.

Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr I recently made the most difficult decision I’ve had to take thus far as a journal editor. That decision was ultimately to accept the paper; that probably doesn’t sound like a difficult decision until I explain that I made this decision despite a referee saying I should reject the paper with no opportunity for resubmission not once, but twice.