Stärkung von Open Research im Berliner Raum – hilfreiche Materialien unterstützen Forschende in allen Phasen ihrer Arbeit

Open Research und Open Access an der Universität der Künste

Open [oh-puhn ] (adjective) not closed…having no means of closing or barring…relatively free of obstruction…without restrictions as to who may participate…undecided; unsettled… (from Dictionary.com) There is a great deal of confusion out there as to what ‘Open’ means, especially in science. The definitions above seem particularly apposite ‘…relatively free of obstruction…’. Certainly undecided or unsettled seems appropriate in some cases.

Last Thursday night I was privileged to be invited to the 10th anniversary celebrations for BioMedCentral and to help announce and give the first BMC Open Data Prize. Peter Murray-Rust has written about the night and the contribution of Vitek Tracz to the Open Access movement. Here I want to focus on the prize we gave, the rationale behind it, and the (difficult!) process we went through to select a winner.

On Monday 30 May I gave evidence at a European Commission hearing on Access to Scientific Information. This is the text that I spoke from. Just to re-inforce my usual disclaimer I was not speaking on behalf of my employer but as an independent researcher. We live in a world where there is more information available at the tips of our fingers than even existed 10 or 20 years ago.

“Open source” is not a verb Nathan Yergler via John Wilbanks I often return to the question of what “Open” means and why it matters. Indeed the very first blog post I wrote focussed on questions of definition. Sometimes I return to it because people disagree with my perspective. Sometimes because someone approaches similar questions in a new or interesting way.

It has become rather fashionable in some circles to decry the complain about the lack of progress on Open Access. Particularly to decry the apparent failure of UK policies to move things forward. I’ve been guilty of frustration at various stages in the past and one thing I’ve always found useful is thinking back to where things were.

The Forschungszentrum Jülich and Frontiers signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a German Consortium with the Open Access publisher Frontiers.

The Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata will come back to Bologna, on 26-27 October 2023.

Discover DOCI, the OpenCitations Index of Datacite open DOI-to-DOI citations