What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of doing scientific research.

One of the things we want the Open Research Computation journal to do is bring more of the transparency and open critique that characterises the best Open Source Software development processes into the scholarly peer review process. But you can talk about changing the way peer review works and you can actively do something about. Michael Barton and Hazel Barton have taken matters into their own hands and thrown the doors completely open.

Paulo Nuin, not the biggest fan of Mendeley wrote a blog post entitled Mendeley is going to be open source, in which he wrote:Among the essays Paulo read is Jason Hoyt's post on the Mendeley blog: Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on?. In response to a question about open sourcing the Mendeley client, Jason replied:Despite the fact that open sourcing the desktop client is the second most requested feature for Mendeley, I think

TreeView X, the open source version of TreeView, has been slowly suffering bit rot as C++ compilers and operating systems change. Every so often I'd tweak the code to build on some Linux version or other, but this isn't something I've a lot of time for. Moreover, because of the hassle of rebuilding binaries and source tar balls the updated versions weren't uploaded to the TreeView X web site.

There has been a lot of recent discussion about the relative importance of Open Source and Open Data (Friendfeed, Egon Willighagen, Ian Davis). I don’t fancy recapitulating the whole argument but following a discussion on Twitter with Glyn Moody this morning [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] I think there is a way of looking at this with a slightly different perspective. But first a short digression.