Write research documents online, together. | Authorea. Project: Research workflow. Conference-journal hybrids. Open science is a research accelerator : Nature Chemistry. In 2006 a website (on The Synaptic Leap forum) was started in which the problem of the production of PZQ as a single enantiomer was laid out7. There was some initial traffic, but there was little substantial community input.
It is a fallacy that open-source products simply emerge — there are usually kernels of activity arising from funded work, to which the community then responds8. In mid-2008 the PZQ project was funded by a partnership between the World Health Organization and the Australian Government that enabled preliminary experiments to be performed and all data deposited in an open-source online electronic lab notebook (ELN) which could be properly curated9. Our ELN was based on an open-source platform, Labtrove, developed10 by a team at the University of Southampton in the UK. Experimental work began in earnest in January 2010. It became clear that PZQ could be efficiently hydrolysed to give an amine (PZQamine, see Route A, Fig. 1) that might be resolvable. How PeerJ Is Changing Everything In Academic Publishing.
Has there ever been a business more ripe for disruption than academic publishing? For anyone who's not been following along, the business model of academic publishers, built on solving 18th century distribution problems, incarnates the Shirky Principle: that "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. " Far from making research public, as the name "publisher" suggests, their business now works by accepting researchers' donations of manuscripts, refining them by other researchers' donations of editorial services and peer review, assuming copyright, and locking up the results -- work that they neither wrote, edited, reviewed or paid for -- behind paywalls. By artificially causing a scarcity problem, they're able to sell solutions to that problem: subscriptions. But publishers are monopoly suppliers of the journals they publish, and, like so many monopolists, have been unable to resist gouging their customers.
L’édition scientifique : son modèle, ses scandales - Omniscience. En 1665, deux premières revues savantes firent leur apparition : Le Journal des Sçavans et Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Leur objectif était la publication d’articles scientifiques afin de favoriser leur diffusion et de développer l’archivage à long terme des résultats scientifiques. En 2009, il existait environ 24 000 journaux à comité de lecture auxquels quelques 1 million d'auteurs contribuaient. En résultent en moyenne 1,5 million de publications/an lues par 10-15 millions de lecteurs dans plus de 10,000 institutions [1], ces nombres augmentant de 6 à 7 % chaque année. Pour réguler ce foisonnement de publications, des maisons d’édition scientifiques se sont développées avec pour rôle initial la diffusion des résultats scientifiques et le maintien de la qualité des publications. Une version de ce texte est disponible en anglais : Scientific publication : the model and scandals C’est la politique de la maison (d’édition) Edito de The Lancet (en anglais) :
Seeing through the eLife Lens: A new way to view research | eLife. We’re excited to announce the release of an innovative, still experimental, new tool that will make reading articles online easier for researchers, authors and editors alike: eLife Lens. This product is an important step in realising eLife's commitment to innovation and openness. eLife Lens makes using scientific articles easier by making it possible to explore figures, figure descriptions, references and more – without losing your place in the article text. While most online research articles simply replicate print, eLife Lens takes full advantage of the Internet’s flexibility. You can absorb key elements in an important paper more readily, more quickly, and more effectively. While this is still an experimental product, and far from complete, we wanted to get it into the hands of as many people as possible as soon as possible so that we can find out how to best move forward.
We are trying to "move fast, and break things". Experimental release notes Document as data eLife plans Credits. Reviews on Demand - Epistemio. Synthèse du rapport sur un état des lieux de la recherche participative en France | Sciences Citoyennes. Publons partners with PeerJ - reviewers get more credit. Aspesi. Numeribib: Vers un accroissement de l’ouverture et du partage des données de la recherche ? Mise à jour du 11 septembre. L'ADBU a mis en ligne sur son site trois dépêches de l'agence AEF, dont la dernière précise les contours de l'intervention d'Alain Bensoussan lors du récent congrès ADBU.
Le CNRS, l’ADBU et le réseau international d’avocats Lexing soutiennent le projet de rédaction d'une "charte universelle de l'open science". Le scénario d'une simple exception au droit d'auteur n'est pas retenu, dans la mesure où une exception ne fait que confirmer la règle, à savoir le maintien des résultats de la recherche dans le pré carré des éditeurs. Il s'agit de fonder un droit de l'open science en écrivant "une charte, puis une loi, puis une convention mondiale”. Le 15 octobre prochain, aura lieu à Toulouse, dans le cadre de la Novela, une Rencontre Interdisciplinaire de l’Académie des Sciences Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de Toulouse, à laquelle je participerai. Le colloque porte sur les impacts du numérique sur la démarche scientifique elle-même. How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science | Randy Schekman | Opinion.
I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession's interests, let alone those of humanity and society. We all know what distorting incentives have done to finance and banking. These luxury journals are supposed to be the epitome of quality, publishing only the best research. These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. It is common, and encouraged by many journals, for research to be judged by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it.
Funders and universities, too, have a role to play. Publons set to revolutionize peer review in physics | Connected Researchers. Publons is another great alternative or complement to the traditional peer review process. Like others, this service is an answer to the slow and rather opaque peer-review process, in which the fate of a manuscript is to the mercy of an anonymous pair of experts. The idea is that publishing research results should not be the limiting step. Papers should be published, then reviewed and commented-on by the readers. This sort of system would allow researchers to have a direct, rapid and interactive feedback on their work.
Andrew Preston and Daniel Johnston, described in their founding article that publon are facetious particle that is to academic research what an electron is to charge. Peter Koveski first described them as “[…] the elementary particle of scientific publication. It has long been known that publons are mutually repulsive. As you might have guessed, Publons is focused on physics manuscripts. The tool was added to the list of Online Tools for Researchers. Adventures in Academia: Totally Open Science: A Proposal for a New Type of Preregistration. Methodological rigor has been the center of a growing debate in the behavioral and brain sciences. A big problem thus far is that we've largely only published results. Preregistration forces us to publish methods and hypotheses ahead of time, which can help with p-value hacking, post-hoc storytelling and the "file drawer" method for dealing with negative or unwanted results. Even prominent journals like Cortex are getting in on preregistration with a publication guarantee, effectively focusing peer review on methods and hypotheses and not on "interesting" results.
Some journals also require data sharing, including Cortex in its new initiative, by uploading to public hosting services like FigShare. I want to go one step further and suggest that it's time to share data, method and process. Preregistration is great and should help us to avoid a lot of post-hoc tomfoolery. We all know that any 1000C finding might be a picked cherry from a rich fruit basket. Context and Curiosity Some Details. The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. January 13, 2012 In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers.
The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist. It all checks out. I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe. Here they are again: profits as a percentage of revenue for commercial STM publishers in 2010 or early 2011: Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36%Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42%Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4% So it’s evident that profits on the order of 35% are pretty typical for commercial STM publishers, and that Elsevier’s figures are not an aberration. Yes, publishers have a right to make a living. But here’s what it means to scientists that Elsevier’s profit is 35.74% of revenue: Like this: Journal editors take note – you have the power – Australasian Open Access Strategy Group.
The editorial board from the Journal of Library Administration has resigned in protest of the restrictive licensing policy imposed by its publisher Taylor & Francis (T&F). Brian Mathews includes the text of the resignation in his blog here. They might not be aware of it, but the editorial board are following in the footsteps of other editorial boards. A webpage put together by the Open Access Directory called Journal declarations of independence lists examples of “the resignation of editors from a journal in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher”. There are 20 journals listed on the pages, with the timeline running from 1989 to 2008. What is a licensing policy? For those people new to open access, a quick explainer. This is referring to the restrictions the publisher is imposing on what an author can do with copies of their published work. Authors are not allowed to deposit the Publisher’s Version So far so good – it seems quite generous.
But there is a catch. Open Science: An Introduction. Image by Alex Galt/USFWS / CC BY This course is a collaborative learning environment meant to introduce the idea of Open Science to young scientists, academics, and makers of all kinds. Open Science is a tricky thing to define, but we've designed this course to share what we know about it; working as a community to make this open resource better. Think of it as a layer on top of the way science is commonly done now. Just better. This course is meant to share information about what it means for science to be open with young scientists (of all ages), and hopefully inspire them to champion things that are more open. A number of communities are networked within Open Science, and we've designed this course as a high-level introduction to topics and groups that are chipping away at closed systems in science. Modules and tasks are structured so that you’re in control of your own exploration of the topic, but there’s a sequenced path to take if desired.