The charge that Political Science (or other non-STEM disciplines) is lacking relevance and does not produce interesting research is made then and again, with two new pieces published these days. One is written by a political economist, stating that most research is boring;

Starting this year, I will stop traveling to any speaking engagements on open science (or, more generally, infrastructure reform), as long as these events do not entail a clear goal for action. I have several reasons for this decision, most of them boil down to a cost/benefit estimate. The time spent traveling does not seem worth the hardly noticeable benefits any more. I got involved in Open Science more than 10 years ago.

I was recently an external examiner for a PhD viva in Cambridge. As we were wrapping up, I asked “if you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?”. It’s one of my stock questions and normally the candidate says “oh I’d do it so much quicker!” or something similar. However, this time I got a surprise. “I would write my thesis in LaTeX!”, was the reply. As a recent convert to LaTeX I could see where she was coming from.

With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher.

Cheering Ourselves up with CUDDEL(s) and Hackathons We have been working closely with the Metabolomics community for a few years now, participating in hackathon events including BYO Data parties and Hack-the-Spec – ISA as a FAIR research object – thanks to our collaboration with the ISA Team at the Oxford e-Research Centre and funding from our BBSRC UK-China partnering award.

Forget Movember – with all the cool open brain science activities happening at GigaScience and the upcoming Society for Neuroscience (SfN) 2016 meeting in San Diego (November 12-16), we are naming it Neuro-November!

A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make the next move. Researchers rightfully argue that they cannot submit their work exclusively to modern, open access journals because that would risk their and their employees’ jobs. Librarians, equally correctly, argue that they would cancel subscriptions if faculty wouldn’t complain about ensuing access issues.

I’m currently writing two manuscripts that each have a substantial data modelling component. Some of our previous papers have included computer code, but it was straightforward enough to have the code as a supplementary file or in a GitHub repo and leave it at that. Now with more substantial computation in the manuscript, I was wondering how best to describe it. How much detail is required?

Join the Open Data club. Every year we catch up with fellow enthusiasts of open data, open source and open science at BOSC, the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference that is a Special Interest Group of the ISCB’s annual ISMB conference. This year there is an interesting juxtaposition with the location, being held at the Disney World resort in Orlando.

Shallow Impact. Tis the season. In case people didn’t know— the world of scientific publishing has seasons: There is the Inundation season, which starts in November as authors rush to submit their papers before the end of year. Then there is the Recovery season beginning in January as editors come back from holidays to tackle the glut.