Research Councils UK (RCUK) – a partnership of seven core UK research funding bodies (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC), has recently released a very welcome draft policy document detailing their proposed Open Access mandate , for all research which they help fund.

[Rather than summarise what’s already been said about Elsevier and their for-excessive-profit practices in recent weeks, I’ll just lazily assume you’ve read it all… right then. Here’s what I have to add.] This post is a real-world anecdote of the problems that Elsevier’s journal bundling & excessive profiteering*** causes.

I’m really pleased this new Open Access paper has just been published.

Yesterday’s post about haywire RSS feeds, reminded me that I should perhaps share a trick or two I know about RSS feeds. This post assumes you know what an RSS feed is, and why they’re awesome. I still encounter researchers everyday who have no idea what an RSS feed is. I have no idea how they cope with the sheer volume of literature being produced these days without RSS feeds!

This is just a short post: to vent my anger at a fair few of my RSS feeds being totally FUBAR’d at the moment. It’s too long for a tweet, and too short for a full post, but here goes: At least three of my ScienceDirect journal article alert RSS feeds are totally FUBAR’d at the moment.

This is a re-post of something I was invited to write to sum-up my experiences at OKCon 2011.

After more than 6 months of waiting, my long overdue first paper has finally been published in Nature Why do I say ‘long overdue’? Doesn’t it usually take a long time for academic papers to get published?

Having just written a lengthy blog post / rant about publishing data for another blog (I’ll link to it later if/when it gets published). I thought I’d post a technical demonstration of my issues here. I want need to extract simple matrices of numbers from research papers for my PhD research. Theoretically, I shouldn’t even need to do this.

Doing some information research ahead of my imminent OKCon 2011, Berlin talk, it’s come to my attention that the Open Access journal PLoS ONE is actually an excellent journal to publish in, with respect to Impact Factor. In the Digital Age, journals are merely vessels in which we can publish our research.

Part inspired by the ‘Bugs!’ blogging contest, part inspired by Morgan Jackson’s post I thought I’d write some thoughts and observations on the recent FlyToL paper (Wiegmann et al. , PNAS, 2011). [ IMPORTANT UPDATE Since I wrote this blogpost, the authors have made the data publicly available.

What’s your Norell number? Taking inspiration from the Erdős number game, I thought I’d use ColWiz’s ‘Link Explorer’ function, and my citeulike bibliographic data to explore (in a highly unscientific way!) the authorship connections between people in my reference database of ~2750 papers. Mark A Norell has LOADS of publications.