OPEN SCIENCE
For the first time in 20 years, new works (from 1923) have entered the public domain. The Internet Archive and Creative Commons are celebrating the “Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain” on January 25th in San Francisco, CA.
Three Springer Nature journals — Communications Biology/Chemistry/Physics — have introduced transparent peer review. Congratulations! There will be more. PLOS and a number of other publishers have committed to introducing transparent peer review.
How appropriate is open peer review of preprints prior to journal publication, especially by a journal reviewer? A debate started when Niko Kriegeskorte published his review of a paper posted on bioRxiv by Bradley C. Love and colleagues, who expressed concerns about the review and its publication. Open peer reviews (and their rebuttals) can be relevant contributions to the scientific process, but a better understanding and framework around open reviews may be needed.
“Sports Science Is Finally Talking About Its Methodology Problems” by Christie Aschwanden for FiveThirtyEight mentions principles of open science as a way to overcome structural problems in the field.
MediArXiv has started, a preprint server for Media, Film and Communication Studies. They’re looking for a steering committee. Launched by Open Access in Media Studies.
To support the Open Science Barcamp in Berlin this March, Melanie Imming has set up an Open Science t-shirt shop.
Dryad has now published 25,000 data packages. Here is to the next 25,000.
Module 5 of the Open Science MOOC is now live. It’s on Open Source and Open Research Software.
PUBLISHING
“The Quest to Topple Science-Stymying Academic Paywalls,” by Joi Ito in Wired.
The Wellcome Trust is updating its open access policy. The new policy supports PubMed Central and Europe PMC, posting of preprints, CC-BY publishing and the DORA declaration, but will not support publishing in hybrid journals.
eLife have published first results from their peer review trial.
The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) has released the results of its survey of 6,000+ account holders/publishers, providing insights into trends in open access publishing.
RESEARCH
Trends in Biotechnology published a review of the Open Insulin Project, which aims to make insulin more accessible for all. There’s more information on the project’s homepage.
PLOS
The PLOS Collection “Machine Learning in Health and Biomedicine” explores its theme with an emphasis on open science, open computer code and reproducibility.
OTHER
Data interoperability of healthcare devices remains an issue owing to lack of open standards, along with the security of the data.
Thirty-five years ago Isaac Asimov tried to predict the world of 2019. He wasn’t too far off concerning computerization.
“Safety Last!” is a silent movie featuring Harold Lloyd. It was released in 1923 and is now in the public domain.
Credit: Wikimedia.
