Last week BioMed Central published a draft position statement on open data (PDF). Iain Hrynaszkiewicz explained the statement on the BioMed Central Blog, including the five Ws of open data: 1. Why make data more open? 2. What data to make more open? 3. Where to make data more open? 4. When to make data more open? 5. How to make data more open? Please comment on the statement.

Today we have a guest posting from F1000’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz covering the topic of medical data sharing One of the world’s most influential medical journals recently highlighted data sharing as an important issue to be addressed if we are to improve the quality of reporting of biomedical research.

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.

As part of the FAIRsharing Community Network (see previous blog) and joint Force11 and Research Data Alliance (RDA) FAIRsharing Working Group we have been involved in efforts to develop a shared, cross-publisher list of recommended data deposition repositories. The first fruits of these are a preprint from the working group and DataCite (of which we are also members) summarising what we feel should be the key criteria for selection.

I’ll try to live-blog the first day of part 2 of the Royal Society’s Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication meeting, as I did for the first day of part 1. We’ll see how it goes. Here’s the schedule for today and tomorrow. Session 1: the reproducibility problem Chair: Alex Halliday, vice-president of the Royal Society Introduction to reproducibility.

Last month (shortly after ScienceOnline2010) David Crotty wrote in a blog post Science and Web 2.0: Talking About Science vs. Doing Science: The blog post is required reading for everybody interested in science and Web 2.0 and has attracted a lot of thoughtful comments (on the blog and on FriendFeed). In another discussion Thomas S ö derquist from the Medical Museion in Copenhagen reminded me that there

Two weeks ago I added a first version of full-text search to the Rogue Scholar blog archive. This was a good start, as blogs typically only have the timeline, tags, and metadata like titles and authors to help readers find relevant content.

Since Sunday afternoon I’ve been at an International Council for Science (ICSU) / Royal Society invited workshop on ‘Revaluing Science in the Digital Age’. We’ve had a fascinating set of talks from academics, publishers (PLoS, Nature, BMC), librarians, policymakers, data managers, scientific societies… Attendees included: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buneman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boulton Jose Cotta, European

Recently I had the opportunity to collaborate on an extremely timely paper on data sharing and data re-use in phylogenetics, as part of the continuing MIAPA (Minimal Information for a Phylogenetic Analysis) working group project:

So there’s been a few already: SpotOn day 1 &