open access

Why don't academics discuss research before starting the work?

In a recent blog post, Jack Kelly asked this simple question, and it is a striking one for those of us who are familiar with collaborating at high levels as part of an open source community. One of the pillars of the open source way is rapid prototyping and the idea of: release early, release often.

In the scientific research community, however, the history of and current state of affairs is closed and secretive. Jack Kelly even began his post with:

Warning: this is a hopelessly idealistic proposal...

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I gave a talk at this year's TEDx Albany event, "Saving Science - Open Up or Perish," where I talked about something that I am very passionate about. For me, TEDx was an opportunity to try out a very different format from my usual technical talks and dig deep down to tell a very general audience about what's going on in science that should matter to them. I shared my journey from my education in Physics to becoming a software developer working almost exclusively on open source software for scientific research and development. » Read more

The year 2013 brought great progress for the adoption of open source in the health and science industries. We covered some excellent open source stories, here the highlights from 2013. » Read more

A celebration of the open access movement, Open Access week hosts events that are aimed at highlighting how open access has transformed the landscape of society due to increased access to scientific research. » Read more

International Day of the Girl is today and a reminder how an open education is critical to the empowerment of women worldwide. In the western world, we often take universal public education for granted. In many parts of the world, however, millions of girls do not attend school and are denied an education.

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As a 21st century netzien, you’ve got plenty of choices when it comes to low cost cloud services. Generally, you pick a favorite provider or two and centralize your world around them. For me, that means: Google Voice, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Music, and Dropbox for file syncing and sharing. Over in the Yahoo cloud, I use Flickr for photo storage and sharing. And, I’ve done enough of the Dropbox bonus activities that I have 7.x GB of space I can access from my phone, laptops, web browsers, and so on. It’s been sufficient for the last few years, but I’m starting to bump up against the size limitations.

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A recent study funded by the European Commission and undertaken by analysts at Science-Metrix, a Montreal-based company that assesses science and technology organizations, has concluded that half of all published academic papers become freely available in no more than two years.

According to the study, the year 2011 is a milestone for open access. By this analysis, 50% of all scientific articles published in 2011 are currently available in some open access form or another, and the trend is toward more and more articles becoming open access.

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If you live in the southeastern US (aka the Bible Belt) as I do, you’ve probably been to a church revival or two (or twenty). Revival is an event intended to light a fire under the 'faithful,' as opposed to the newcomer. As I sat at NC Datapalooza last week, I felt that I was in a revival, without the obvious religious overtones, of course. I was amazed at how far the Raleigh area has come in terms of understanding and accepting open data principles.

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Selena Deckelmann, a data architect and contributor to PostgreSQL, gave a keynote speech at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference this year called, What open source communities can do for teachers. At the end she encouraged the audience (of teachers) to connect with free and open source developers in their communities to work with them to schedule 15-20 minute talks about their work students.

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I began paragliding a few years ago. It’s maybe the most weather-dependent sport in the world. We often fly in mountainous areas, very close to the ground. We need to know about local effects like thermal updrafts, clouds growth, mountain-breeze, foehn wind, and all sorts of other micro weather effects.

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