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Promoting Open Science

Posted on July 30, 2016  Comments (2)

As I have written many times in the past we need to take back science from the closed-science journals. Historically journals were useful (before the internet). With the advent of the internet (and its spread) instead of maintaining the mission they started with the journals sought to maximize their profit and their own pay and jobs at the expense of sharing scientific knowledge with the world.

Elsevier — my part in its downfall by Timothy Gowers provides another good look at what can be done to promote science, math and engineering by addressing the damage to that goal being done by closed science publishers.

Recently he announced the launch of Discrete Analysis, a new journal that publishes to arXiv.

Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access from the Max Planck Digital Library provides some good ideas for how to promote science in spite of the closed science journals fighting that goal.

There needs to be a shared understanding that the money currently locked in the journal subscription system must be withdrawn and re-purposed for open access publishing services. The current library acquisition budgets are the ultimate reservoir for enabling the transformation without financial or other risks.

Related: The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge – Why Copyright Extension is a Very Bad Idea – Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science (2007) – Harvard Steps Up Defense Against Abusive Journal Publishers (2012)

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Available Online

Posted on August 30, 2014  Comments (1)

The Feynman Lectures on Physics are now available to read online. They are a great collection of lectures covering physics and touching on many areas including: the Mechanisms of Seeing, Semiconductors and Algebra. This is a fantastic resource for learning about physics.

You can also get a boxed set of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for those that like paper. It is fantastic but not cheap.

Bill Gates bought the rights to the rights to The Character of Physical Law, 7 lectures Feynman gave at Cornell University (these are separate from the lectures listed above) and made them available online, which is great. Unfortunately the website is based on Microsoft tools and therefore quite a bother for many (or maybe even impossible with Linux computers – I am not sure). I guess since he made all his money via Microsoft it isn’t that surprising but it would have been nice if he provide the content in a more easily accessible way (even if they didn’t do the fancy additions they did on the Microsoft site. These are great enough videos to probably be worth the bother of installing proprietary Microsoft software in order to view them.

Related: Video of Young Richard Feynman Talking About Scientific Thinking – Feynman “is a second Dirac, only this time human” (Oppenheimer) – Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character

Nobel Prize Winner Criticizes Role of Popular Science Journals in the Scientific Process

Posted on December 10, 2013  Comments (2)

Randy Schekman, 2013 Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine has written another critique of the mainstream, closed-science journals. How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science

Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.

We all know what distorting incentives have done to finance and banking. The incentives my colleagues face are not huge bonuses, but the professional rewards that accompany publication in prestigious journals – chiefly Nature, Cell and Science.
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There is a better way, through the new breed of open-access journals that are free for anybody to read, and have no expensive subscriptions to promote. Born on the web, they can accept all papers that meet quality standards, with no artificial caps. Many are edited by working scientists, who can assess the worth of papers without regard for citations. As I know from my editorship of eLife, an open access journal funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society, they are publishing world-class science every week.
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Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of the bonus culture, which drives risk-taking that is rational for individuals but damaging to the financial system, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals. The result will be better research that better serves science and society.

Very well said. The closed access journal culture is damaging science in numerous ways. We need to stop supporting those organizations and instead support organizations focused more on promoting great scientific work for the good of society.

Related: Fields Medalist Tim Gowers Takes Action To Stop Cooperating with Anti-Open Science Cartel – Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid – Harvard Steps Up Defense Against Abusive Journal Publishers – The Future of Scholarly Publication (2005) – The Trouble with Incentives: They Work – When Performance-related Pay Backfires – Rewarding Risky Behavior

Huge Human Population Boom 40,000 to 50,000 Years Ago

Posted on March 14, 2013  Comments (1)

Interesting open access paper on looking at the Y-chromosome to explore our ancestry: A calibrated human Y-chromosomal phylogeny based on resequencing. I can’t understand all the details but the basic idea isn’t that complicated. It is interesting to see these details as are the conclusions that can be drawn: that we had a big explosion of human population o 41,000–52,000 years ago.

This population explosion occurred, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60,000 to 70,000 years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10,000 years ago.

“We think this second, previously unknown population boom, may have occurred as humans adapted to their new environment after the first out-of-Africa expansion,” says Dr Qasim Ayub, lead author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger institute. “We think that when humans moved from the horn of Africa to Asia, Australia and eventually Europe, they remained in small groups by the coasts. It took them tens of thousands of years to adapt to the mountainous, forested surroundings on the inner continents. However, once their genetic makeup was suited to these new environments, the population increased extremely rapidly as the groups travelled inland and took advantage of the abundance of space and food.”

The work highlights how it is now possible to obtain new biological insights from existing DNA sequencing data sets, and the value of sharing data. The majority of the DNA information used for this study was obtained from freely-available online data-sets.

This is the first time researchers have used the information from large-scale DNA sequencing to create an accurate family tree of the Y chromosome, from which the inferences about human population history could be made.

Full press release

Related: Laser Tool Creates “blueprints” of Archeology Sites – HHMI on Science 2.0: Information Revolution – Scientists crack 40-year-old DNA puzzle

Open Source Ecology: Using Open Engineering to Create Economic Benefit

Posted on February 7, 2013  Comments (1)

Open Source Philosophy. from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

I think the video’s message is overly simplistic and unrealistic (great innovations often seem unrealistic so I don’t mind people trying things I don’t think are likely to succeed in the ways they imagine). But I believe in the concepts of using our knowledge to use appropriate technology to make the standard of living better for everyone. Open access to scientific knowledge is important to such efforts and to the economic well being of modern society.

Open Source Ecology provides a modular, DIY (open access), low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The are recruiting for an Operations Manager, and an Executive Team (based in Kansas City or New York City in the USA).

Related: Pay as You Go Solar in India – Student Engineers Without Borders Project: Learning While Making a Difference in Kenya – Reducing Poverty Through Entrepreneurism

Harvard Steps Up Defense Against Abusive Journal Publishers

Posted on April 24, 2012  Comments (1)

For a decade journals have been trying to continue a business model that was defensible in a new world where it is not. They have becoming increasing abusive with even more outrageous fees than they were already charging. As I said years ago it has become obvious they are enemies of science and should be treated as such. The time to find mutual beneficial solution past years ago.

Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices

Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.

A memo from Harvard Library to the university’s 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year.
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he memo from Harvard’s faculty advisory council said major publishers had created an “untenable situation” at the university by making scholarly interaction “fiscally unsustainable” and “academically restrictive”, while drawing profits of 35% or more. Prices for online access to articles from two major publishers have increased 145% over the past six years, with some journals costing as much as $40,000, the memo said.

More than 10,000 academics have already joined a boycott of Elsevier, the huge Dutch publisher, in protest at its journal pricing and access policies. Many university libraries pay more than half of their journal budgets to the publishers Elsevier, Springer and Wiley.
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Research Libraries UK negotiated new contracts with Elsevier and Wiley last year after the group threatened to cancel large subscriptions to the publishers. The new deal, organised on behalf of 30 member libraries, is expected to save UK institutions more than £20m.

These journals have continuously engaged in bad practices. Scientists should publish work in ways that enrich the scientific community not ways that starve the scientific commons and enrich a few publishers that are doing everything they can to hold back information sharing.

In 2008 Harvard’s liberal arts faculty voted to make their research open source.

Related: Fields Medalist Tim Gowers Takes Action To Stop Cooperating with Anti-Open Science Cartel – Science Commons: Making Scientific Research Re-useful – MIT Faculty Open Access to Their Scholarly Articles – Merck and Elsevier Publish Phony Peer-Review Journal – Open Access Journal Wars

Fields Medalist Tim Gowers Takes Action To Stop Cooperating with Anti-Open Science Cartel

Posted on January 26, 2012  Comments (2)

The Fields medal is know as the Nobel of mathematics. Tim Gowers was awarded the Fields medal in 1998 for contributions to functional analysis, making extensive use of methods from combinatorial theory. Tim Gowers is currently the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. He posted recently on his decision to stop supporting (with his actions, such as submitting paper and reviewing papers) the anti-open-science behavior of Elsevier (a particularly aggressive anti-open-science publisher that also has very bad pricing practices).

Elsevier — my part in its downfall

One method that they have for getting away with it is a practice known as “bundling”, where instead of giving libraries the choice of which journals they want to subscribe to, they offer them the choice between a large collection of journals (chosen by them) or nothing at all. So if some Elsevier journals in the “bundle” are indispensable to a library, that library is forced to subscribe at very high subscription rates to a large number of journals, across all the sciences, many of which they do not want. (The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to.) Of course, given that libraries have limited budgets, this often means that they cannot subscribe to journals that they would much rather subscribe to, so it is not just libraries that are harmed, but other publishers, which is of course part of the motivation for the scheme.
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Elsevier supports many of the measures, such as the Research Works Act, that attempt to stop the move to open access. They also supported SOPA and PIPA and lobbied strongly for them.
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I also don’t see any argument at all against refusing to submit papers to Elsevier journals.

So I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes

Good for him. All we need is for more and more scientists, mathematicians and engineers to support open science with thier actions and open science will be the way things are. It is as simple as that. The outdated business practices of the old journals will die. Either the existing publishers will finally give up on their extremely outdated practices or they will be replaced.

Related: The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge – Merck and Elsevier Publish Phony Peer-Review Journal – The Future of Scholarly Publication (2005) – Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid (2007) “It is time for the scientific community to give up on these journals and start looking to move to work with new organizations that will encourage scientific communication and advancement”

Royal Society Journal Embraces Open Access

Posted on January 23, 2012  Comments (0)

Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access

The Royal Society…journal archive – which includes the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online.

Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available.
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reasures in the archive include Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper, geological work by a young Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated account of his electrical kite experiment.

The move is being made as part of the Royal Society’s ongoing commitment to open access in scientific publishing.

Good for them. Slowly more and more are realizing clinging to old fashion publishing models are contrary to promoting science and scientific literacy.

Related: 340 Years of Royal Society Journals Online – Britain’s Royal Society Experiments with Open Access (2006) – 8-10 Year Olds Research Published in Royal Society Journal

Journal of Emerging Investigators Will Publish Middle and High School Student Research Papers

Posted on January 16, 2012  Comments (2)

The Journal of Emerging Investigators is a new journal for publishing research paper and reviews of research papers by middle school and high school students from any country.

The Journal of Emerging Investigators strives to provide students with as much access to original scientific writing as possible. With this in mind, all submissions are covered by an attribution non-commercial, no derivative license. This means that anyone is free to share, copy and distribute an unaltered article for non-commercial purposes.

Graduate students with substantial research experience will review the manuscripts.

All hypothesis driven science is acceptable for research articles. This includes, but is not limited to, life science, physics, chemistry, health, psychology, and physiology. Engineering articles are also accepted as long as there is a clear question and hypothesis being tested.

Hopefully this will encourage some students to give research a try. Advisors may submit items for publication (students have to have an mentor/teacher do the submitting.

Similar journals: The Journal of Experimental Secondary Science, open science 🙂 – Canadian Young Scientist, closed science 🙁

Related: 8-10 Year Olds Research Published in Royal Society Journal – YouTube SpaceLab Experiment Competition – Open Access Engineering Journals – Kids on Scientists: Before and After

A Possible Explanation for the Faster Than Light Result Anomaly

Posted on October 14, 2011  Comments (2)

Faster-than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity

So what is the satellites’ motion with respect to the OPERA experiment? These probes orbit from West to East in a plane inclined at 55 degrees to the equator. Significantly, that’s roughly in line with the neutrino flight path. Their relative motion is then easy to calculate.

So from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite, the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing. “From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,” says van Elburg.

By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground.

The OPERA team overlooks this because it thinks of the clocks as on the ground not in orbit.

How big is this effect? Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observes.

It is great to see the scientific process at work. Those is support of the scientific method support open access science and this explanation is available via arxiv: Times Of Flight Between A Source And A Detector Observed From A GPS Satellite.

Related: Faster Than Light Speed Anomaly Reported by CERN – More Dark Matter Experiment Results – The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge

Posted on April 28, 2011  Comments (2)

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

Larry Lessig speaks at CERN about the proper use of copyright and the moral case for open access. As I have written many times, I strongly believe our society is better off when science is open. I believe we now are allowing a few greedy institution (that seek to restrict science for the benefit of their organization) to pay our politicians to damage society for the benefit of a few donors.

Related: The Future of Scholarly Publication – Toward a More Open Scientific Culture – Why Copyright Extension is a Very Bad Idea – Patent Gridlock is Blocking Developing Lifesaving Drugs – Bad Government, Closed Access – John Conyers Against Open Science – Science Commons – Public Library of Science