Here’s my submission for the House of Lords inquiry. I rather ran out of steam writing it so you’ll see it tails off towards the end. There’s probably loads of things I should mention too. But alas, I have lots of other work to be getting on with right now. Ironically, I highlight the excellent journal Impact Factor’s of some OA journals. Please forgive me for those sins! So here it is:

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m very passionate on the subject of data sharing in science, and after all the relevant conferences I’ve been to and research I’ve done – I don’t mind saying I’m fairly knowledgeable on the subject too. It’s part of the reason I got this Panton Fellowship that has helped me develop my work and do what I want to do in pursuit of Open Data goals. So when I saw this article come up on my RSS feeds – I thought great!

I’m proud to announce I have a new article over at Palaeontology [Online] Posts at ‘P [O]’ are primarily aimed at public-engagement and since the site was launched back in July 2011, with sponsorship and support from the Palaeontology Association, one post per month has been featured on site. This month [December], I’ve written a rather different type of post for them.

A few months ago I gave a short talk about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its activities as relevant to academics at a small (but good!) palaeontology conference in Cambridge (which I blogged about previously). I didn’t need to give this talk. Neither the OKF nor my academic progression required me to give this talk.

I just sent this email to Darin Croft (of SVP). I chose to contact him because he recently answered questions about the embargo for EmbargoWatch and it was rather unclear who else I should approach. I did not want to blanket email the whole council.

Sometimes you just have to laugh… The year is 2012, we have the internet, we have blogs, and a huge variety of other tools to enable free, efficient and rapid communication of information and yet the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting rules still insist that all information within this year’s abstract booklet remain a big secret until the day of the event. Many others have justly written to complain about this before.

I’m really pleased this new Open Access paper has just been published.

This is a re-post of something I was invited to write to sum-up my experiences at OKCon 2011.

After more than 6 months of waiting, my long overdue first paper has finally been published in Nature Why do I say ‘long overdue’? Doesn’t it usually take a long time for academic papers to get published?

Having just written a lengthy blog post / rant about publishing data for another blog (I’ll link to it later if/when it gets published). I thought I’d post a technical demonstration of my issues here. I want need to extract simple matrices of numbers from research papers for my PhD research. Theoretically, I shouldn’t even need to do this.