A short one this time, honestly. I’ve written plenty about the Research Works Act, both on this blog and in The Guardian .  Those writings have mostly focussed on the practical implications of the bill.  But those aren’t the real reasons that it invokes such rage in me.  That comes from this definition (from the text of the bill): So if Randy Irmis gets an NIH grant to research some subject;

Lead by researchers at the University of Oxford, a group of more than 30 scientific organizations around the globe, have worked to produce a common standard that will make possible the consistent description of enormous and radically different databases compiled in fields ranging from genetics to stem cell science, to environmental studies.

Isn’t it ironic? The full article is here, for those with privileges to read it.

Nachdem die Europäische Kommission im Dezember bereits eine Studie zum Stand von Open Access in Europa veröffentlicht hat, wurde jetzt ein Bericht zur Umsetzung von Open Access im 7. Forschungsrahmenprogramm vorgestellt: Die “Survey on Open Access in FP7” (PDF) basisiert auf einer Befragung von geförderten Projekten, die vom “Open Access Pilot” der EU betroffen sind.

The graphic above shows articles available in UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) – read-only articles: green; Open Access articles: blue – compared to the number of abstracts in PubMed.

I’ve had it up to here with this misconception.  I just read it yet again, this time in a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Michael Eisen’s recent piece in that paper on the RWA.  The letter says some good things, but then right in the middle we have this: This is just one more example of a pernicious and persistent assumption.

Today marks the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, and as we enter the supposedly auspicious year of the Dragon now is a good opportunity to look towards developments in the nascent field of data publication over the upcoming year. This week marked important announcements of new and improved data publication platforms.

Although I’m on record of being no fan of the tabloids, there’s no doubt that they are hugely influential.  So it has to be good news to find that in the last few hours, both Nature and Science have publicly come out against the Research Works Act.

Just a quick note that my article Academic publishers have become the enemies of science is now up on the Guardian’s Science Blog.  Spread the word! (You’re welcome to comment here, of course, but if you post your comments on the Guardian site, they will be much more widely read.

In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers.  The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist.  It all checks out.  I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe.