This is a short reflection on a new Working Paper I’m an author on. The paper is largely the work of Jason Potts with contributions from myself, Lucy Montgomery, Ellie Rennie, and John Hartley. The moment that I decided it was time to move on from PLOS is crystal clear in my mind.
When I saw the anonymous piece “Openness is Inclusivity†it both struck a chord and made me uncomfortable. Striking a chord because I’m increasingly concerned about the institutionalization and centralization of Open Science activities. Uncomfortable because it comes across as an attack, and an anonymous one at that, on one organization.
Once again, reproducibility is in the news. Most recently we hear that irreproducibility is irreproducible and thus everything is actually fine. The most recent round was kicked off by a criticism of the Reproducibility Project followed by claim and counter claim on whether one analysis makes more sense than the other.
The following is my application to join the European Commission Open Science Policy Platform. The OSPP will provide expert advice to the European Commission on implementing the broader Open Science Agenda. As you will see some of us have a concern that the focus of the call is on organisations, rather than communities.
It has been painful to watch the tensions at the Wikimedia Foundation explode over the last few months and with the stepping down of the Executive Director there seems a mood of conciliation and a desire for WMF to learn from the process. I know next to nothing of the details or the story, so while it is the spur for this post I don’t want to offer any opinions on WMF itself.
I promised some thinking out loud and likely naive and uninformed opinion in my plans for the new year. Here’s a start on that with apologies to Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Studies people who’ve probably thought all of this through.
Cite as “*Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2016) Where are the pipes? Building Foundational Infrastructures for Future Services, retrieved [date], https://cameronneylon.net/blog/where-are-the-pipes-building-foundational-infrastructures-for-future-services/ ‎” * **You probably don’t think too much about where all the services to your residence run. They go missing from view until something goes wrong.
I’m not much for end of year or beginning of year posts but I have found that putting down plans is a good way of holding myself to account (and that a few people out there might help with that job…you know who you are). I also think my use of this space may change a little over the coming year, so for those of you still using RSS (yes! we do still exist!) this may have an impact on including me or not in your selection for 2016.
I’ve been engaged in different ways with some people in the rare genetic disease community for a few years. In most cases the initial issue that brought us together was access to literature and in some cases that lead towards Open Science issues more generally. Many people in the Open Access space have been motivated by personal stories and losses, and quite a few of those relate to rare genetic diseases.
Eight publishers will move to require ORCIDs for corresponding authors as part of the submission requirements for submitting articles. It seems like a very long time ago that I got involved in the efforts to develop an ID system for contributors to research outputs.
Standard Analytics have released a very useful paper looking at platform costs for scholarly publishing. In the paper (which coincidentally demonstrates part of the platform system they are developing) they make some strong claims about the base cost of publishing scholarly articles.