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An open and dynamic research community exists, HackYourPhd invites you to discover it and show you that we all have a role to play!
What do we know about the research world? Often not much or nothing very attractive. The community of researchers seems too often walled up in its ivory tower. Yet, a committed group of people and initiatives aiming to open up this research in order to make it more dynamic, collaborative, and transparent does exist. This movement began largely in the United States, which is why Célya, cofounder of HackYourPhD, invites you to go on a journey. Through a web-documentary, discover the current situation of scientific research, which is far from being heartening. But also meet those in the USA who imagine and work to build a more open science! This investigative project relates to research, design, entrepreneurship, and hacking, and those involved devote a considerable amount of work and expertise to it. The freedom of expression that this campaign provides is an inexhaustible source of innovative ideas and an extremely fertile setting for those who need inspiration. (...)
F1000Research, an Open Access lifesciences journal launched in January 2013, has pioneered a uniquely fast and transparent Open Science Publishing model enabling research papers to be published within a week. After analyzing its first few months, F1000Research shares that on average, articles go live within seven days of acceptance, with 35% of those published within four days or less. (...) - by James Douglas, Blog "STM Publishing News", Arpil 23, 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
In September 2011 I returned to work after a year on maternity leave. Many things needed sorting out, not least my digital presence at my home institution, which had switched to a content management system that seamlessly linked to University College London’s open-access repository, “Discovery.” The idea was we should upload open-access versions of all our previously published research, and link to it from our home pages, to aid in dissemination. (...) - by Melissa Terras, Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012
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
Faced with the daunting prospect of profiling the complexities of the immune system, researchers at Harvard Medical School/Business School enlisted the help of the world’s largest community of software experts on the site TopCoder. A recent paper in Nature Biotechnology indicates a cultural shift in academia with experts engaging the collective skills of those outside their community, in order to help them overcome methodological barriers to their work. (...) - by Zara Quadir, International Science grid this week (isgtw), March 20, 2013
New scientific research must be published for free online, the vice-president of the European Commission said, in a move designed to increase the knowledge pool open to small business and lead to more innovative products. (...) - By Anna Leach, Wall Street Journal Blogs 'TechEurope', 2013/03/19
Depuis plusieurs mois resurgissent en France les débats sur l’open access des revues de sciences humaines. Ils semblent cependant bien mal engagés. (...) - par EricMonnet, Tracés. Revue de sciences humaines, “Open access : la schizophrénie française”, Le carnet de Tracés, publié le 8 mars 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
EyeWire is an online community of “citizen neuroscientists” who map neural connections by playing a game.
Play EyeWire to map the 3D structure of neurons and contribute to revolutionary crowd-sourced scientific discovery from Seung Lab at MIT. By joining EyeWire, you can help map connections between retinal neurons. This information advances neuroscience research on how the retina functions in visual perception. You also help the EyeWire team, based at MIT, develop computational technologies for mapping the connectome.
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,
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Start-up Shazino releases PaperShip, an iPad and iPhone client for the Mendeley reference manager software which allows academics to access their account from everywhere. (...) - Shazino, Press release, 30 April 2013
Academia has a reputation for being a bit of a closed world, a walled garden of knowledge where secrets are jealously guarded. But the truth is that collaboration is at the very heart of research and scientific discovery, and that for science to advance, researchers need to get together, compare notes, disagree, and have their ideas challenged and built upon by others. Often this happens naturally – like in the cafeteria where PhD students will chat about their projects – but in such a hyper-specialized environment, chances are that people who share your particular research interests cannot be found in the same institution or even the same country. What then? (...) - by Alice Bonasio, Mendeley Blog, 15 April 2013
In a previous blogpost, I criticised a recent paper claiming that playing action video games improved reading in dyslexics. In a series of comments below the blogpost, two of the authors, Andrea Facoetti and Simone Gori, have responded to my criticisms. I thank them for taking the trouble to spell out their views and giving readers the opportunity to see another point of view. I am, however, not persuaded by their arguments, which make two main points. First, that their study was not methodologically weak and so Current Biology was right to publish it, and second, that it is unfair, and indeed unethical, to criticise a scientific paper in a blog, rather than through the regular scientific channels. (...) - by Deevy Bishop, BishopBlog, 21 March 2013
[Audio] Le lundi 4 mars 2013, l’équipe du séminaire « les Aspects Concrets de la Thèse » invitait les sociologues Antonio Casilli et Karim Hammou à venir discuter de la place qu’occupent actuellement les médias sociaux dans le métier de chercheur, des possibilités qu’ouvrent ces nouveaux outils mais aussi des pièges qu’ils peuvent receler. La séance donna lieu à un état des lieux des pratiques, à un partage d’expérience et à une réflexion théorique sur les enjeux des médias sociaux pour la recherche. (...) - par Fabien Provost, Les Aspects concrets de la thèse, 08/04/2013
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
Jeudi 14 mars, une vingtaine de doctorants et jeunes docteurs de l’université de Nanterre se sont rendus à leur formation doctorale malgré la neige. La plupart sont en doctorat de lettres ou de sciences humaines et sociales. Tous étaient là pour entendre parler de blogs scientifiques, de networking et de réseaux sociaux. Quel intérêt quand on est en thèse ? (...) - MyScienceNews, par Laurence Bianchini, 05/04/2013
Emerging publisher Frontiers is joining Nature Publishing Group (NPG) in a strategic alliance to advance the global open science movement.
NPG, publisher of Nature, today announces a majority investment in the Swiss-based open access (OA) publisher Frontiers. (...) - Frontiers, 27 Feb 2013
Crowd-sourcing is a somewhat loaded term, particularly when it comes to impact and public engagement. When Jeff Howe coined it in his 2006 Wired article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, he was drawing a conscious parallel with the concept of out-sourcing, moving essential tasks in the manufacturing and service industries from costly European and US labour markets to ones in the Far East, India etc. And in those early days, crowd-sourcing was very much about furthering the aims of for-profit business: design competitions, distributed production, micro-tasks that anyone could perform as long as they had the time, the inclination and enthusiasm and, very likely, access to the Internet. As Daren C. Brabham called it, crowd-sourcing was ‘an online, distributed problem-solving and production model’. (...) - by Stuart Dunn, LSE blog "Impact of Social Science", March 21, 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
A group of psychologists are launching a project this week that they hope will make studies in their field radically more transparent and prompt other fields to open up as well. With a pledge of $5.25 million from private supporters, they have set up an outfit called the Center for Open Science. (...) - ScienceInsider, by John Bohannon on 5 March 2013
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![[Mendeley] Worldwide Research Collaboration Mapped Out | Science 2.0 news | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/xR-50vARZcsdBlOBf9x4Nzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
