New article by Thomas Hostler in the Journal of Trial and Error:
“There is a high chance that without intervention, increased expectations to engage in open research practices may lead to unacceptable increases in demands on academics.”
Here's a paywalled editorial recommending #OpenAccess, #OpenData, and #OpenScience. The authors/editors could easily have made it OA, but they put it behind a paywall instead.
“Everyone agrees that open-access scientific articles are great. What most people don’t know is that ‘open-access’ often means that the authors paid the journal to make their article freely available. As in, the journal was going to make money charging readers, but it charges the writers instead. And those writers are usually paying with federal grant money. So ‘open access’ is really ‘government scientific funding goes directly to for-profit publishers.’
How much money are we talking here? Sam Gershman, a neuroscientist at Harvard, estimates that it’s millions of dollars per week. Just as one data point, getting Nature to make The Illusion of Moral Decline open-access cost a jaw-dropping $12,000. This is truly one of the greatest scams of all time.”
Rumor has it that Germany is close to sealing a DEAL with Elsevier. I wouldn't be surprised if their per article payments would be above the level that caused the walk-out...
"‘Too greedy’: mass walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees"
I'm not sure when I missed the evolution of the term 'preprints' from meaning prior to publication in a journal to something that means prior to peer review, but I'm not sure if that will ever make sense to me.
The idea of having a dedicated venue for #OpenScience, akin to Dagstuhl and Oberwolfach, would be amazing, wouldn't it?
We could use this place to create systemic change, allow exhausted researchers to reboot, run hackathons, summer schools, seminars, workshops, or celebrate our achievements in improving the quality of research... 💭
Read more about my daydreaming in this week's newsletter post!
In more happy news, NASA has just updated their policy on releasing software to make it easier to release their software as open source.
This is really into the policy weeds, but it makes it easier to release scientific software, develop software openly, and contribute to existing open source projects.
I kinda wish all papers had a one-paragraph section, similar in size and style to the Acknowledgement, on origin of the project. I think it'd make a lot more of the process of science more transparent, esp to newcomers.
I am super excited about this mini-conference on #reproducibility in #linguistics that I am organising this evening: Four of my M.A. students will be reporting on their attempts to reproduce the results of four published quantitative linguistics papers for which the data is available, but not the code!
Colleagues, they have a lot of things to report! So, if you're in the area (Cologne), do come along! There will be #ReproducibiliTea and Christmas biscuits! 🍵 🍪 #OpenScience
We’re excited to announce that COS is collaborating on a pilot program with Meta. Using innovative methods from the open science movement to promote rigor and transparency of research, Meta and COS will pilot a new approach to industry-academia partnerships for accessing social media data. https://bit.ly/48OzLnu
I don't think everyone realizes how much #neuroscience#opendata is really downloaded and reused...
e.g. our dataset of responses to visual stimuli has 18,000 downloads; wholebrain #zebrafish neural activity from the Ahrens lab has 7,000 downloads; Nick Steinmetz's eight-probe Neuropixels data has 6,500 downloads. and there are many commonly used neuro datasets on websites that don't count downloads that must have thousands too!
Is there a simplified version of the CRediT (https://credit.niso.org/) taxonomy of contributor roles out there? I love the idea but never got why anyone would care about about the four different types of manager or whether someone "curated" or "collected" the data used in a paper.
The story of #SciHub and its founder Alexandra Elbakyan in her fight against the global network of academic journals that underlie published scientific research.
One does not contribute to the development of the research or the software itself, but one helps others that don't know how this is done with the Open'ing aspects.
Of course, I know that there are several online resources for learning, but what beats a mentor who dedicates some if his/her time?
> [P]osting unreviewed research on a preprint server is not new or controversial [...] But palaeoanthropology is not a field that needs urgent research and rapid breakthroughs. Given the huge and wide public interest in human evolution and our origins, this research field benefits from much slower, measured, and careful research.