Yesterday I attended a round table discussion hosted by the Belmont Forum about the release of their position on data accessibility statements and digital objects management plans. (It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the reason is that they are aiming to be clear and comprehensive around what they are asking to make it easier for researchers, publishers and other stakeholders to get to compliance around this policy.) You can read their position paper — Draft DAS Statement and Policy for October 2018 Plenary - Google Docs. ... (more)

Last week the eLife innovation sprint happened in Cambridge. It was done in collaboration with the Mozilla global sprint. I was able to participate for some of the event, and I’ll write up a bit more about the project I worked on later. There is a slide deck that summarises all of the projects from the two days: Slides of outputs from the sprint: eLifeSprint2018_introductions_people&projects - Google Slides. Briefly, this was hands down one of the most productive two-day sprints that I’ve ever been involved in. ... (more)

eLife’s peer review process is really good. One of the key attributes of this is that reviewers are not blind to one another, and they have to consult with one another. This largely removes the third reviewer problem. We also publish the decision letters and the author responses to the decision letter. Reviewers have the option of revealing themselves to authors. As with most review systms our reviewers know who the authors are. ... (more)

There are two very interesting recent examples of review by community on highly exciting results. They both share one very important characteristic, but stand in stark contrast to one another in almost every other regard. The first is the [paper on making STAP cells via use of an acid bath] lemon juice. If confirmed, the result is transformative. The result was published after peer review to tremendous fanfare in Nature. Very quickly the community tried to replicate the result with no confirming replication happening. ... (more)

Michael Nielson Keynote on Open Science He rightly points out that he is probably going to be talking to the converted, so his talk is aimed at looking for resources that can help us to find answers about how to make open science works. He starts talking about an example of failure in open science. his example is an open notebook science from Tobias J Osbourne. He built up a readership of about 100 readers on a highly technical field, but he was not getting much participation, and very little feedback. ... (more)

I just read the brief article by Paul Ginsparg about 20 years of the ArXiV. I think the article is a must read for anyone who is thinking about scientific communication. It’s short, and very readable. The things that stand out for me from this article are the following: There are real costs associated with running services on the web. Ginsparg originally imagined that the service that he created could run automatically and that he would be able to get back to his research projects very quickly. ... (more)

I just posted the below as a comment on a blog, but it was good so I thoughtI'd repost here What is open science and what is the system? Well I am sure that there aremany viewpoints on this, so I am going to just put forward one here. At a fundamental level 'the system' is how we ascribe credit toparticipation in science. The credit is converted to grant money, thedollars keep the food on the plate. ... (more)