Partially Attended

This is a report on todays consultation on open data that was help by the EC. The notes are long, so I have put my conclusions and general comments at the start. General comments There was not much disagreement throughout the day. There were repeated calls for the need to incentivise researchers to engage in data sharing, but not too many concrete proposals on how to do this. It does seem from my perspective that libraries could do an amazing job here, but that will depend on to which extent these libraries have deep technical expertise. ... (more)

The following is the written representation that I made to the EC hearing on Open Data on behalf of Co-Action publishers, Copernicus Publications, eLife, F1000 Research, FigShare, Frontiers, Open Books Publishers, PeerJ, the Public Library of Science, Ubiquity Press and Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (QScience). I had a five minute slot to present, and the key recommendations at the end of this written response formed the basis of that presentation. I added one slide at the end with a personal view on some of the challenges of getting researchers to share data. ... (more)

Mark Ware recently asked me some questions about the state of web scale annotation, based on my impressions from the recent iannotate conference (at which I gave a short talk on the idea of research threads) What is the eLife view of annotation systems? We like the fact that there is now a W3C standard for Open Annotations (OA). We are encouraged that so many projects out there are looking to make their annotations interoperable with this standard. ... (more)

I took a look at the T&F survey with interest. I’m also very aware of the concerns and confusions that exist around licensing. I’m also aware of the “one size doesn’t fit all” argument. I’ll address the T&F survey first, and then I’ll briefly discuss CC-BY pros and cons, purely from the point of view of my own understanding of these issues - I might be very wrong on this. ... (more)

I’ve been using virtualenv for a while, but in the past few months, since taking up the role of head of technology for eLife, I’ve been giving much more thought about how to build scalable development environments. Ever since I was managing connotea, one of the biggest pains has been configuration management. I seem to have spent almost more time on configuring environments than on actually doing any development work (disclaimer, I don’t actually do much coding, I usually do more product management, but it’s really useful to know the development pain points). ... (more)

212 climbing review. OK, time to review the year. I wrote out some goals at the start of last year. Goals for 2012 were remain injury free (not done) significantly reduce the amount of alcohol that I consume (done) fall off at least 10 routes of 6c or harder/month (not done) redpoint 7a, but don’t stop trying harder things (not done) get three campus board sessions or power hand sessions into my training per month (done) My training diary from 2011 looked like: ... (more)

Well, it’s been almost a week since I got back from Fontainbleau. It was, as usual, a magical trip. Were took advantage of the row of bank holidays to get in a nice long spell in the forest without having to take too much time off work. I’d been training like a fair old bastard in order to get fit for Marie Rose, but in the end a couple of injuries stopped me going near the route, which was a pity. ... (more)

I’m about to head to Fontainbleau for another short climbing trip. I’ve been going there since 2003, this will be my 10th anniversary of going to font. The first time I went there I brought a lot of expectations with me. I was climbing pretty well and I fully expected that I should be able to run up problems of about font 6a. I think I fell off of that first 3a 6 times before I got it. ... (more)

On Monday the 14th of January we met at the PLOS offices in Cambridge to hear a talk from Euan Birney on lessons learned from publishing data rich publications though the encode project. This was the first time that Euan was far less worried about the print, and far more worried about how well the online version was going to work. Dimensions of the project 5 TeraBases 1715 times the size of the Human Genome 3k experiments 410 authors on the main paper 6 high profile papers ~35 companion papers The output should not be thought of as papers, but as the raw data. ... (more)

I’m at PridcutTank 6. Todays topic is big data. Hether Savory - Open Data User Group She is the chair of the open data user group. She is using a recipe analogy for the use of data in the creation of products - data is an ingredient, but you have to get the ingredients right. (There are a number of people in the audience who work with public sector data, and more people who work with open data, but most people know about this, but they don’t use it). ... (more)