Day 0 of OpenCon started with me missing the pre-conference drinks reception because my flight from Chicago was delayed by 2 hours. I got into Washington, D.C. (DCA) at about midnight & then had to wait half an hour for a blue line train to take me the short distance from the airport to the conference hotel — I’m a diehard for public transport! Finally arriving at the hotel past 1 o’clock in the morning. Not a great start.

Last Saturday I went to Hack4Ac – a hackday in London bringing together many sections of the academic community in pursuit of two goals: To demonstrate the value of the CC-BY licence within academia. We are interested in supporting innovations around and on top of the literature. To reach out to academics who are keen to learn or improve their programming skills to better their research.

Quick note on an app I threw together using the Mendeley API that I discussed in the previous post. This app is crude, and given that the Mendeley API is rate-limited and in flux it might not work for you. The basic idea is to embellish make the list of literature cited in an article with information that might help a reader decide whether a given citation is worth reading. One clue might be how many people on Mendeley are reading that article.

Last Thursday night I was privileged to be invited to the 10th anniversary celebrations for BioMedCentral and to help announce and give the first BMC Open Data Prize. Peter Murray-Rust has written about the night and the contribution of Vitek Tracz to the Open Access movement. Here I want to focus on the prize we gave, the rationale behind it, and the (difficult!) process we went through to select a winner.

I think it is fair to say that even those of us most enamored of post-publication peer review would agree that its effectiveness remains to be demonstrated in a convincing fashion. Broadly speaking there are two reasons for this; the first is the problem of social norms for commenting. As in there aren’t any.