Alex Holcombe › Comments

1. With Leonie Hayes (repositories at U of AKL) and @nickdjones (Centre for eResearch U AKL and involved in eresarch infrastcture for NZ) we want to run a session called 'Is New Zealand ready for Open Science'. We are Hoping Alex will join us. Both NZ and Oz have an 'open access mandate' (NZGOAL in NZ and I think it is called AUGOAL or something in Australia) whereby govt agencies are encouraged to deposit their data under creative commons. One of the people involved in NZGOAL will be there, and I would love to see Universities (or at least research funding bodies) listed in the NZGOAL (so far only crown research institutes are) One of the topics of converstaion in the planning with Nick and Leonie was to think a bit about what 'open science' is worth fighting for given the NZ (and OZ) contexts (which may be somewhat different from US and Euriope) - Kubke

Quick report back from #kiwifoo. Just got home with melted brain and the need to review a few documents for a meeting tomorrow. The short version:- 1. We did have a session on open science (well 2 really) and got wonderful feedback. I think that we can get good things going, and this is always good news.2. I got a good outline from Josh from enspiral regarding daniel's project, and now... more... - Kubke

be breach of contract? - Alex Holcombe

I would like to do a German version of this one. Any chance of sharing the script/ settings? - Daniel Mietchen

Now also available via http://www.youtube.com/watch... and http://www.openaccessweek.org/video... and http://vimeo.com/30917560 . - Daniel Mietchen

ha ha - nice one..... I'm in. - Graham Steel

I haven't done anything- too busy with other OA stuff :) An alternative search term to use might be "most expensive neuroscience journal" or we could try making blog posts that use both terms. What do you think? I think maybe we'd several dozen ppl to make it work, so if you like it do you want to ask some others and we'll see how many we get on board? - Alex Holcombe

"We evolve scalable, sustainable enterprises that enable intellectual freedom and the flow of culture and scholarship. Beyond a copyright framework to protect our investments, we strive for the widest distribution and access to our publishing that we can achieve." - Kubke from Bookmarklet

Johnstone's comments are not far off the mark either.... - Kubke

Left a comment: "I agree with you 100%. I don't think it's necessary to pledge to both refuse to referee AND stop submitting to closed-access journals. There's nothing logically inconsistent with stopping reviewing, but continuing to submit. Personally, all of our lab's submissions will be OA, unless I'm a co-author on a paper and that PI wants to shoot for a closed journal. I haven't... more... - Steve Koch

I know I didn't think of it, and here I am in 2007 making a resolution to that effect: http://www.sennoma.net/main.... (I don't even want to think about whether I kept all of those resolutions, but I did keep the one about not reviewing for TA publications.) - Bill Hooker

Thanks Bill, I've added you to the list of people who have pledged here: http://www.openaccesspledge.com/... I made http://www.openaccesspledge.com in hopes of getting mass pledging going but am still working on the wording of the pledge. Michael Taylor and I are hoping to join forces- Michael is arguing for a much stronger pledge, but the several people I've bounced it off of,... more... - Alex Holcombe

Hmmmm. Good questions. - Yo Joe. No, go slow.

I didn't know about SCOAP3; SCOAP3 is great! Reading between the lines of the SCOAP3 report, it sounds like although almost everyone in high-energy physics has posted some version of their article on arxiv, it's often not en earlier version than the post-print. Is that right? Is that the reason libraries are still subscribing to the HEP journals? And/or is it partly out of a patronly feeling they need to sponsor the existing peer review process? - Alex Holcombe

WIll respond offline when I'm back home from work. Definately count me in !! Never seen www.xtranormal.com before. Looks much more whizzy than something similar I've used before. Have you used it before Alex (i.e. do you have an account)? - Graham Steel

thanks Graham - Alex Holcombe

Tallinn Airport - WiFi internet & Skype - Tallinn Airport is the first airport in the whole world, providing FREE OF CHARGE Wifi internet connection all over the passenger terminal. - Daniel Mietchen from Bookmarklet

Just arrived in Tallinn, and the connection is good so far. @ Matthew yes, Incheon wifi is great. - Daniel Mietchen

time for open access outlets - Alex Holcombe

I don't think I am liable, but don't want to support such commenting activity if it is illegal. - Alex Holcombe

Thanks guys- also if any of you disagree with GE's points, feel free to comment on my blog (http://bit.ly/psyMfH ), because GE writes as if I'm the only one with my "illogical" views that "make no sense" regarding the possibility of fast-track fees biasing the journals - Alex Holcombe

". About 65-70 percent of submissions end up being published, says Binfield. " - Alex Holcombe

"‎stringent policies dealing with items such as disclosure requirements, data deposition standards, and ethical concerns. In addition, every paper has to pass a detailed technical checklist of over 40 items before even entering the peer review process" - Alex Holcombe

Not obvious to everybody :( And because I haven't made a pledge yet, I make all these exceptions. Like for cool paper in prestigious journal. Or for paper that should be citing me more :) Plus, if nobody knows we're doing it, won't spread as much. - Alex Holcombe

Sure, I'll support and sign. Did this for myself a while back -- http://www.sennoma.net/main... -- and don't even have to make an exception to help out a colleague any more. I haven't been asked to do so since that post, but if I'm asked again to review for a non-OA journal I will decline and explain why. One useful thing a pledge could do is provide a standard explanation that people could copy/paste or link. - Bill Hooker

thanks Bill, and I've got to add you to my list of earlier pledgers http://bit.ly/lTtxmE - Alex Holcombe

Liking the entry not the topic! - Bill Hooker

I gotta write to somebody at ARC and see if I can get the official story of why they backed off somewhat on OA - Alex Holcombe

searching the web, I found only philosophy and law OA pledges, and institutional mandates, not individuals - Alex Holcombe

I remain of the view that there are also very large opportunities for publishers getting into this arena to mismanage the process catastrophically...but will be very interesting to see... - Cameron Neylon

In terms of the OA Mega Journal, what about BMC? Current portfolio of 216 Journals. Would it make any sense or not to move some or all of these over to a "BMC ONE" type Mega Journal? @Egon see this rather cool Mendeley/PLoS mashup http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Graham Steel

I'll need the help of people here to address their responses, hopefully to convince the journals to stop these policies, as I believe they threaten science's good reputation. http://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/tag... - Alex Holcombe

direct link to the letter: https://docs.google.com/documen... - Alex Holcombe

@Alex... that common is misplaced... I wanted to make the parallel with other uses of financial incentives (bribe, lobbying complemented with party donations, etc)... the 'common' in the comment was a left over... sorry about that. - Egon Willighagen

_Obesity Reviews_ has a “Fast Track Facility”: A submission fee of $1,000 or £750 for articles up to 9000 words long, or $1500 for articles more than 9,000 words long guarantees peer-review within 10 working days - Alex Holcombe

Alex, I doubt many people are going to read this far down the comments on this thread. I'd try posting a new item to your feed and the Science 2.0 room just saying "we think the letter is ready to go, please consider signing". I think that's a reasonable thing to do, and not spammy. - Bill Hooker

"It will take many years for some of the research to catch up to Western standards." - Alex Holcombe

We are losing our top spot and when the brain drain kicks in, it may be irreversible. Already some fields like stem cells are struggling. However, sneering at "low quality" mass produced Chinese publications doesn't suggest any useful solutions. - Mr. Gunn from Android

How many hours do they suggest again 10000... that's how long it takes them to catch up. - Egon Willighagen

Just talked to our desktop team and journal abbreviations are not currently supported, but are likely to be worked on in the next sprint. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime. - Steve Dennis

Agreed. I know M's free, and works very well, and I support it. But how loooong's it going to be? - Matthew Todd

Thanks- I'm thinking of an online-only journal that can help get the abstracts indexed in relevant databases like ISI and PubMed. I think PDFs are fine, no other print functionality is needed. The publisher should also provide a journal management system for the submission / reviewer recruitment /action editor management / action letter generation etc. workflow. - Alex Holcombe

Thanks guys! especially for the biomedcentral link. For a non-author-pays option (subscription model), Still wondering what might be an inexpensive and generally fair-dealing publisher.. - Alex Holcombe

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about peer review, pre and post publication, and the somewhat bizarre attachment of research community to the traditional approaches. A news article in Nature tho, in which I am quoted seems to have really struck a nerve for many people. The context in which the quote is presented doesn’t really capture what I meant but I stand by the statement in isolation. I think there are two important things to tease out here, firstly a critical analysis of the problems and merits of peer review, and secondly a close look at how it could be improved, modified, or replaced. I think these merit separate posts so I’ll start here with the problems in our traditional approach. - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, wonderful post and some good arguments in there. Richard Smith has said similar things for years. But where do we go from here? One suggestion: adopt the arXiv system used in physics and mathematics, making everything immediately available as preprint. These fields still have peer reviewed papers, but peer review plays a very different (and much smaller) role. - Martin Fenner

maybe they hope to be more attractive than PLoS ONE thanks to the various web2.0 type stuff they are working on, although that would have to be very significant to outweigh the generally non-open-access nature of Nature... In any case, yes it is a victory for the ONE model. Nature would have low marginal overhead on this, so they probably reckon they might as well try to get their piece? - Alex Holcombe

If the content is freely accessible it will be a great resource. If there is a CC license preferably with few restrictions it would be even better. - Mike Chelen

http://www.nature.com/nature... ""The science budget should be split into three (not necessarily equal) parts and downloaded to departments. The local institutions, and not government departments, should disburse funding as they are close to the coalface and can decide what needs support and what is in the long-term interest of the department. There should be no research proposals on which to waste time. One part should go to young people chosen by their universities as the researchers on which their institution's future will depend — they have done the work, why waste time doing it again when people have no time and are too far away from the coalface and in general do not have the relevant expertise? The second part should go to a group whose most recent report was excellent. This is the racehorse solution — if a scientist has just done some great work, let her or him run again." - Alex Holcombe

If you have ideas of how this should be made stronger for future years, maybe we can sign a letter to the ARC together. It would be good to move towards a stronger mandate - Alex Holcombe

The explanation I heard - about ten years ago - is that the old ban on payment had nothing to do with OA, and was rather due to the ARC simply not wanting to pay author fees, on top of what libraries were already paying for subscriptions. (Different organizations of course, but most of it ultimately comes from the same source: taxpayers.) Admittedly, this was hearsay, but it was from a pretty reliable source. - Michael Nielsen

Appears to be a complete draft text of Judea Pearl's book on causality. I've had the final chapter especially recommended to me. - Michael Nielsen

what a joy of discovery it was when I read the final chapter, some years ago- I felt I had been missing out on an intellectual revolution that had happened under my nose - Alex Holcombe

Reviewer #2: The authors describe a pedestrian simulation of a kinetic system for kinesin with an enormous number of states (80). I see no new insight from the analysis, nor do I anticipate any new insight from the extension to include applied force. Bluntly put, I learned nothing from reading this paper and consequently I do not recommend publication. - Steve Koch

Nice hat! - Chris M

Maybe Ricardo's talking about if else (two words), which I also hate because of the need to put else on same line as the close-bracket. http://www.mail-archive.com/r-help@... I didn't know about ifelse, so thanks! - Alex Holcombe

I recently made the most difficult decision I’ve had to take thus far as a journal editor. That decision was ultimately to accept the paper; that probably doesn’t sound like a difficult decision until I explain that I made this decision despite a referee saying I should reject the paper with no opportunity for resubmission not once, but twice. One of the real problems I have with traditional pre-publication peer review is the way it takes a very nuanced problem around a work which has many different parts and demands that you take a hard yes/no decision. - Cameron Neylon

I have the same problem as you, and take the same view. The issue frequently comes up when I'm editing for PLoS ONE. I'll be sending reviewers and others confused about PLoS ONE to your post. - Alex Holcombe