Aaron Swartz fought for and (effectively) died for open access to the world’s scientific literature. I reflect on Swartz’s legacy, six years after his death.

Welcome to the first post of ‘Economics from the Top Down’. This will be a blog about new ideas in economics and the social sciences. I use the word ‘economics’ in a liberal sense. Few trained economists will recognize what I do as ‘economics’. Perhaps a better word would be ‘political economy’. Or even better, just ‘social science’. But before diving into the content of this blog, I should introduce myself. My name is Blair Fix.

Citizen Science at UNEA4 As GigaScience has the aim of opening and democratising science as far as it can go, we even work towards the involvement of non-professional “citizen scientists” in the scientific process.

We tend to know a good open source research software project when we see it: The code is well-documented, users contribute back to the project, the software is licensed and citable, and the community interacts and co-produces in a healthy, productive fashion.

This November, the city of Niterói in Rio de Janeiro received the first edition of LATmetrics, an international conference dedicated to the advancement of altmetrics and open science research in Latin America. Bringing together researchers, science communicators, librarians, and other stakeholders, the event featured a diverse array of speakers on everything from social media metrics and open data to the impact of science in society.

Join us for the next Open Science Beers YVR Thursday, March 14, 2019 6 PM – 9 PM The Emerald (555 Gore Ave) About Open Science Beers YVR During last year’s FORCE11 conference, the idea was born to recreate Montreal’s popular Open Science Beers event right here in our very own Vancouver. Now, that idea has become a reality. Each month, we’re bringing together friends of Open Science* for a casual evening of drinks and conversation.

On the occasion of the first “BigDataDay” at our university, I have summarized on the below poster our two main efforts to automate the publication of our tiny raw data. On the left is our project automating Buridan data deposition at FigShare using the ROpenSci plugin and the consequence of just sending the links to the data and the evaluation code to a publisher, instead of pixel-based figures, when submitting a paper.

Open Science Trek, The Next Integration Fostering and promoting more open and transparent science is one of the goals of GigaScience , and to do this we have been big promoters of open peer review as well as preprints servers. Combining both of these, Academic Karma was the one of the first platforms to focus on open review of preprints, and has helped facilitate this over the past 3 years.

**Over 200 participants spent three eventful days in Berlin last week to discuss ideas, ongoing projects and future developments around Open Science. As an appropriate location to demonstrate the benefits of breaking down barriers, the motto of FORCE2017 was “Changing the culture”. While most of the GigaScience team was in Shenzhen for ICG, Hans Zauner was on hand in what is one of our favourite meetings.

Following FAIR principles is good for your colleagues, it’s good for the community, and it’s good for science. But what’s in it for the researcher, in return for committing to open science?