science

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

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

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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A new Linux Foundation Collaborative Project has the potential to advance science through the use of open source software.

The Linux Foundation announced this week that it is joining forces with the life sciences information framework OpenBEL, an open source software project that captures, integrates, stores, and shares biological knowledge through organizations.

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Chemistry is not the most open field of scientific endeavor; in fact, as I began working more in the area (coming from a background in physics), I was surprised with the norms in the field. As a PhD student way back in 2003, I simply wanted to draw a 3D molecular structure on my operating system of choice (Linux), and be able to save an image for a paper/poster discussing my research.

This proved to be nearly impossible, and in 2005 a group of like-minded researchers got together at a meeting of the American Chemical Society and formed an unorganization: The Blue Obelisk (named after their meeting place in San Diego).

There is now no question that genomics, the study of the genomes of organisms and a field that includes intensive efforts to determine the entire DNA sequence of organisms, has joined the big data club. The development of prolific new DNA sequencing technologies is forcing biologists to embrace the dizzying terms of terabytes, petabytes and, looming on the horizon, exabytes.

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Sunglass, a platform for collaborating on 3D projects in real time, and DIYRockets, a global space company helping humanity establish a civilazation in space by building an open space frontier, are partnering in an effort to build rocket engines. » Read more

Pete Herzog began an article he wrote for opensource.com last year about Hacker Highschool by saying:

It might sound strange, but every industry and profession could benefit from an employee as creative, resourceful, and motivated as a hacker. 

You see, Pete is not only motivated by what open source and open thinking can do to change our world, he is moved by it. He tell us that his passions change every few years, but always revolve around open source. 

Right now, he's working on an open source project called: Smarter Safer Better, a study and research (what he calls, neuro-hacking) on trust. Read more about his work on the subject: What They Don't Teach You in "Thinking Like the Enemy" Classes and Mind Control.

The Obama administration recently responded to a petition asking the government to "require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."

I first heard about the petition on Google+, and am very proud to be signature #52. Back then 25,000 signatures seemed like a tall order for what is a somewhat niche area. In the end, the petition gained over 65,000 signatures and an official response from the White House. The Open Science Federation posted a screen capture of the 25,000th signature landmark on June 3, 2012. John Wilibanks started the petition with signature #1.

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