This was originally posted here! Happy New Year everyone! It’s that time of year when all the summaries of an amazing year of research are coming out, and goodness, what a year it’s been! The folk over at Altmetric have been kind enough to summarise the top 100 articles of 2015, measured by their altmetrics scores – a measure of the social media chatter around articles. All the d ...[Read More]
How to write to your MEPs about European Copyright reform
This was originally posted here. I mentioned in a previous post how important it is for researchers to equip themselves with knowledge about copyright issues (like this), and to become active in the struggle against publishers in retaining fair re-use rights for research. In the European Commission, this has been quite a high-profile debate this year (see here for example), with some preliminary r ...[Read More]
SVPCA 2015
This year, the 63rd Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy is taking place alongside the 24th Symposium of Palaeontological Preparation and Conservation with the Geological Curators’ Group (what a mouth-full..), at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton. I don’t have much to say about this conference, as I’m heading to it’s international co ...[Read More]
The Open Research Glossary round 2
A few months ago, we published the crowd-sourced Open Research Glossary, details of which can be found here. We’ve taken this to the next level now, and published the updated and much prettier version of this resource on Figshare. This means it is now openly licensed for re-use, and can also be cited like any normal research article. We also popped it on Zenodo, because why not! The original ...[Read More]
OpenCon 2015 Applications are Open!
See this post about Open Con 2014 for more information Applications to attend OpenCon 2015 on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium are now open! The application is available on the OpenCon website at opencon2015.org/attend and includes the opportunity to apply for a travel scholarship to cover the cost of travel and accommodations. Applications will close on June 22nd at 11:59pm PDT. OpenCon seeks ...[Read More]
Welcome to the Open Glossary
At the London satellite event for Open Con earlier this year, myself and Ross Mounce were given some useful feedback after our joint talk on ‘Open Data’ by one of the attendees. Apparently, some of the terminology was too complex, or specialist, for the subject, and some of the talk was unable to be followed unless you were already an expert in the issue. Now obviously this is somethin ...[Read More]
Twitter logos for conference talks
Recently, there was a pretty massive discussion about the practice of live-tweeting at conference talk hosted on this blog. While the discussion is by no means over, or particularly conclusive, one idea to emerge was having an icon of some sort on slides during talks to indicate whether or not they could be live-tweeted. Sarah Werning has been kind enough to create and share some logos following t ...[Read More]
“Open access wins all of the arguments all of the time.”
One is rather inspired. OpenCon 2014 was a wonderful time bringing together the best minds in early career research and the ‘world of open’ to discuss how we make access to knowledge, data, and educational resources better for everyone. It wasn’t so much an event*, as a milestone. Here’s the story of its success. I don’t want to run through the basics of each aspect o ...[Read More]
Let’s have a discussion about live-tweeting academic conferences
Tl,dr version: I think we need more appropriate guidelines for live-tweeting conferences, specifically regarding the broadcasting of sensitive research. This should be at the discretion of the author, and ideally stated at the beginning of each talk. Suzie Maidment, a colleague and friend of mine, recently started a major discussion on and off the internet with the following tweet: “I do think we ...[Read More]
Top scientific publisher chooses not to advance open access By Erin McKiernan, independent, and Jon Tennant, Imperial College London Access to research is limited worldwide by the high cost of subscription journals, which force readers to pay for their content. The use of scientific research in new studies, educational material and news is often restricted by these publishers, who require authors ...[Read More]