I’ve been rather preoccupied in the last few months hence the lack of blog posts. (Apologies!) Here’s a quick recap of some things I’ve done since July: Got married in China (in September) Successfully proposed that the Systematics Association (of which I’m a council member) should sign DORA Gave an invited talk on open science at an INNGE workshop at INTECOL 2013 Completed and handed-in my PhD thesis last Thursday!

In the last 2 weeks I’ve given talks in Brussels & Amsterdam. The first one was given during a European Commission (Brussels) working group meeting on Text & Data Mining. There were perhaps only ~30 people in the room for that. The second presentation was given just a few days ago at Beyond The PDF 2 (#btpdf2) in Amsterdam.

So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with pdfinfo and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest. But Rod Page kindly alerted to me the fact that I might be using the wrong tool for this investigation.

Why is it so difficult to identify academic publisher PDFs? With published MP3 files of audio you get rather good metadata. Take for example an MP3 file I downloaded from Hacker Public Radio available at the bottom of this post.

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

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

just a quick post… I’m pretty shocked at the poor indexing service given by Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge (or ISI Web of Science as you might know it). I’ve unashamedly bashed them before and I’ll bash them again here.

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.

After sending a letter to my local MP, urging him to support the recommendations of the Hargreaves Report on Intellectual Property reform in parliament nearly a month ago (sent on the 17th June 2012) – I finally have a reply! Sadly, it’s not the reply I wanted. Don Foster does not appear willing to support the Early Day Motion on Intellectual Property law reform to further enable research, that I explicitly asked him to sign.

I sent my local MP (Don Foster, Lib Dem) a simple, fairly short (~265 words), clear & concise formal letter 18 days ago – I blogged the draft of it which is virtually the same here. It’s been at least 13 working days now by my count and I still haven’t received a proper reply, so I tweeted @DonFosterMP last night:   http://storify.com/rmounce/hargreaves-edm