Der Erfolg von Linux hat gezeigt, was Open Source bewirken kann. Ähnliche Modelle haben sich auch anderswo etabliert: Open Content, Open Data, Open Access und viele weitere Schlagworte stehen für ein neues Modell der Produktion und Verbreitung von Inhalten, Daten und Wissen. Doch nicht überall, wo „open“ draufsteht, muss auch „open“ drin sein.

In this post I’ll go through an illustrated example of what I plan to do with my text mining project: linking-up biological specimens from the Natural History Museum, London (sometimes known as BMNH or NHMUK) to the published research literature with persistent identifiers. I’ve run some simple grep searches of the PMC open access subset already, and PLOS ONE make up a significant portion of the ‘hits’, unsurprisingly.

I've put off writing this post about the Bouchout Declaration for a number of reasons. I attended the meeting that launched the declaration last year, and from my perspective that was a frustrating meeting.

Open data is a well-defined concept but in the public sector, there is some difficult work ahead for its digital curation. Although the support and production of open data from governments around the world varies (with many not yet supporting it at all) there are clear movements to encourage and grow open government data initiatives.

For those that know me as a biologist it might perhaps surprise you to know that my most cited publication so far is on Open Access and Altmetrics (published in April 2013, 25 cites and counting…) — nothing to do with biology per se! So I took great interest in this new publication: Wang, X., Liu, C., Mao, W., and Fang, Z. 2015. The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention.

Open Science has emerged into the mainstream, primarily due to concerted efforts from various individuals, institutions, and initiatives. This small, focused gathering brought together several of those community leaders.  The purpose of the meeting was to define common goals, discuss common challenges, and coordinate on common efforts.

Just a quick post to congratulate the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their fabulous new research policy covering both open access & open data. One of the key things they’ve implemented for 2017 is ZERO TOLERANCE for post-publication embargoes of research. Work MUST be made openly available IMMEDIATELY upon publication to be compliant. No ifs, no buts. Let’s just remind ourselves why other major research funders like RCUK &

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.

Sheer Heart Attack Diagnosis is key to beginning treatment for preventing coronary heart disease, the most common cause of heart attacks. One useful tool in the fight against this leading killer is magnetic resonance imaging, which allows the direct examination of blood flow to the myocardium of the heart.

Using big data to understand the tree of life New work just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and GigaScience reveals important details about key transitions in the evolution of plant life on our planet, and present a huge cache of computational results, data and tools for plant biologists.