Science 2.0 news

Publishing giant vows to retain 'great culture, talent and collaborative spirit' of London-based startup.

Publishing group Reed Elsevier has upped its efforts to build its digital business with the $100m (£65m) acquisition of London-based academic social network Mendeley.

The acquisition of Mendeley, which allows academics and organisations to organise their research and journals, as well as to collaborate online, aims to bolster science publishing unit Elsevier, home to the Lancet. (...) - By Mark Sweney, The Guardian, 9 April 2013

writeLaTeX is a free service that lets you create, edit & share your scientific ideas easily online using LaTeX, a comprehensive & powerful tool for scientific writing. The site offers you an easy to use two-panel interface. The left pane is used for editing text; the preview of your text is updated in the right pane. Over the weekend, the team at Write LaTeX went live with a ‘push to figshare‘ option. (...) - Figshare

Dr. Victor Henning, CEO at Mendeley, presents his talk with the title "How to make Sharing easy for Researchers, will Publishers become redundant?" at the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) 2013. See more about APE 2013 here:http://www.ape2013.eu/ [Youtube, 2013/03/10]

Richard Kirby: My team at Plymouth University want to understand what is happening to microscopic creatures at the bottom of the food chain

If you are a sailor, angler or small boat owner and would like to take part in a unique global study of the health of the oceans then I need your help. My team of marine biologists and computer scientists at the University of Plymouth are aiming to recruit thousands of seafarers from around the world who are willing to collect simple data while out at sea and submit it to us via a free app – called Secchi. If we get enough of it, the data will form a unique global database on the productivity of the oceans and how they are being impacted by climate change. (...) The Guardian, Posted by Richard Kirby, 

Friday 8 March 2013

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. (...) - by Thomas Crouzier, Connected researchers, April 11, 2013

Instead of worrying about the 'potential destruction' open access might have on the humanities, says Martin Eve, why not work towards a solution? 

When it comes to open access in the humanities, it does not feel, to many, as though they were born open or are achieving openness but, rather, that they are having openness violently thrust upon them. (...) - by Martin Eve, The Guardian, 25 March 2013

Join a mission to Mars or eavesdrop on whale chit-chat by taking part in interactive research projects that are fast turning pupils into scientific pioneers (...) - by Matthew Jenkin, The Guardina, Friday 5 April 2013

Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open access publishing leading to a "pay to say" system for the rich?

Will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even more in the direction of the natural sciences?

I don’t think so. But it took me a while to get there. (...) - by Curt Rice, Blog "Thourghts on university leadership", March 27, 2013

Whether the scientific establishment likes it or not, science is changing. Opportunities available to scientists now are becoming increasingly scarce, and, as students aspiring to be working scientists, we have no choice but to adapt. As Charles Darwin famously said in his defining work, “Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” (...) - The Student Blog, By Tyler Shimko, February 22, 2013

Summary

• The Government is pushing academic publishing to a ‘pay-to-say’ model in order to achieve open access to publicly funded research
• This ‘gold’ route to open access, which levies Article Processing Charges (as proposed in the Finch Report and taken up by RCUK and HEFCE) poses a major problem for academics in the UK:
  • It threatens academic freedom through pressures on institutions to distribute scarce APC resources and to judge work by standards other than peer review
  • It threatens research funding by diverting existing funds into paying for publications (and private journal profits) rather than into research
  • It increases academic inequality both across and within institutions, by linking prestige in research and publishing to the capacity to pay APCs, rather than to academic qualities
  • It threatens academic control of research outputs by allowing for commercial uses without author consent
• In response, academics should:
  • Practice and lobby for ‘green’ open access of all post-peer reviewed work within journals and institutions
  • Lobby against proposed restrictions on REF2020 and against compliance pressure for ‘gold’ open access
  • Demand clear policies from Universities around open access funds
  • Ensure institutional resources are not unnecessarily spent on APCs
  • Protect the integrity of scholarly journals by rejecting the pressure for ‘pay-to-say’ publishing

Blog The Disorder of Things, 4 December 2013,