I just submitted some comments to SPARC / PLOS / OASPA’s request for public comment on their new HowOpenIsIt? material here. If you haven’t done so yourself, the deadline is TODAY 5pm (EST). Below are the comments I submitted. A mixture of praise for remembering to include machine-readability.

Wow! Where to begin… In this post I shall attempt to summarise some of OKFestival 2012. Some Background: I had been to the Open Knowledge Conference last year (in Berlin), where I gave an invited talk on Open Palaeontology and met lots of brilliant people in the Open Science community like Bjoern Brembs, Cameron Neylon & Peter Murray-Rust.

I said I would make an update on Tuesday (today), so if I get this posted before midnight I will ( just ) have met that  goal… In this (minor) update I have: added: Ubiquity Press (great low cost option!), SPIE (scored for 1-column per page), SAGE Open, Frontiers, WileyOpenAccess, OxfordOpen (OUP hybrid option), GigaScience, Open Biology (Royal Society) added the label for: Pensoft (sincerest

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

Considering I emailed him on a Friday, Darin Croft has done well to reply to my questions about the SVP abstract embargo so soon, on Monday. I don’t always get such swift replies, so that is much appreciated.

It’s the Olympics now so this work update is a) late and b) short Nevermind… As ever progress has been exciting – look what we can extract from some PDFs: (click to enlarge each) Attribution: The left panel is from Cánovas et al. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:371 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-11-371 On the left is the original figure, and on the right we have an SVG representation of the data we can extract

I realise thus far, I may not have explained too clearly exactly what I’m doing for my Panton fellowship. With this post I shall attempt to remedy this and shed a little more light on what I’ve been doing lately.

It’s that time again… time to write my monthly Panton Fellowship update. The trouble is, as I start writing this it’s 6am (London, UK). I arrived back from the Hennig XXXI meeting (University of California Riverside) after a long flight yesterday and am supremely jetlagged. I still can’t decide whether this is awesome (I can get more work done, by waking up earlier), or terrible as I can’t keep my eyes open past 9pm at night!

[A monthly update on my Panton Fellowship related activities] Last month I was slightly late with my monthly report, so this month I’m going to get things back on track and write my post now, on this leisurely sunny Sunday afternoon… It’s been a good month: First of all, I had the chance to speak about my Fellowship work for the Ede & Ravenscroft Prize final.

If you haven’t heard yet – I was successful in my Panton Fellowship proposal I wasn’t the only successful applicant either – huge congratulations to Sophie Kershaw and her excellent proposal to train doctoral students how to do Open Science at Oxford University.