UK PubMedCentral, a UK mirror of PMC and a growing project at the British Library is soliciting responses to a survey: Much of the survey asks questions about what additional tools you use for scientific search etc and what features you would like to see in UK PMC. This worries me as it seems like duplication both of effort and the creation of yet another del.icio.us/Facebook/Google/whatever for scientists.

I spent last week in Cuba. I was there on holiday but my wife (who is a chemistry academic) was on a work trip to visit collaborators. This meant I had the opportunity to talk to a range of scientists and to see the conditions they work under.

I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions. But in the spirit of the several posts from people looking back and looking forwards I thought I would offer a few. This being an open process there will be people to hold me to these so there will be a bit of encouragement there. This promises to be a year in which Open issues move much further up the agenda. These things are little ways that we can take this forward and help to build the momentum.

So while I have been buried in the paper- and lab-work there has been quite a lot of interesting stuff going on. Pedro Beltrao has started an Open Notebook style project at Google Code which he describes in a post on Public Ramblings. This in interesting, because once again someone is using a different system as an Open Notebook. We have Wiki’s, Blogs, TeX based documents, and now, software version repositories being used.

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council currently has a call out for proposals to fund ‘Network Activities’ in e-science. This seems like an opportunity to both publicise and support the ‘Open Science’ agenda so I am proposing to write a proposal to ask for ~£150-200k to fund workshops, meetings, and visits between different people and groups.

I blogged the other day about the way charges for reproducing figures in review articles appear to have gone ballistic. At that stage I only had the cost for J Biol Chem which was a whopping $USD73 to reproduce a figure. I had three other images I was using and was expecting around $20 for them, based on the website that Science Direct points you at for permissions. Well I was wrong, they have now come back at $USD3 each.

I’ve been fiddling with this post for a while and I’m not sure where its going but I think other people’s views might make the whole thing clearer. This is after all why we believe in being open. So here it is in its unfinished and certainly unclarified form. All comments gratefully received.

Interesting morning negotiating the problems of getting permission to re-produce figures in a review I am currently writing. I wanted to reproduce figures from four papers, two from J Mol Biol (Elsevier), one from Structure (Cell Press), one from J Biol Chem (ASBMB). I could request permission for all three journals from copyright.com and as I’m in a rush I did this.

Some responses to John Wood’s talk on e-science infrastructure at AHM2007. The talk focussed on large scale infrastructure and the need for co-ordination. There are serious political and logistical problems for making proper coordination happen. A couple of interesting comments came out; Need for the involvement of historians and sociologists to follow what is happening.

I don’t really want to add anything more to what has been said in many places (and has been rounded up well by Bora Zivkovic on Blog Around the Clock, see also Peter Suber for the definitive critique, also updates here and here). However there is a public relations issue here for the open science movement in general that I think hasn’t come up yet.