Richard Grant asked me to record a few minutes of audio talking about the ideas around the proposed Workshop on research metrics and reputation for The Scientist.

Image via Wikipedia David Crotty, over at Scholarly Kitchen has an interesting piece on metrics, arguing that many of these have not been thought through because they don’t provide concrete motivation to researchers to care about them.

Open Access Week kicks off for the fourth time tomorrow with events across the globe. I was honoured to be asked to contribute to the SPARC video that will be released tomorrow. The following are a transcription of my notes – not quite what I said but similar.

I had a pretty ropey day today. Failing for 45 minutes to do some simple algebra. Transformation overnight that didn’t work…again…and just generally being a bit down what with the whole imploding British science funding situation. But in the midst of this we did one very cool and simple experiment, one that worked, and one that actually has some potentially significant implications. The only things is…I can’t tell you about it.

The rationale behind open approaches is the way it enables you to make unexpected connections and to find otherwise hidden shortcuts. People, data, code, and expertise can be more effectively connected when the information is out there and discoverable. Here I wanted to document a little collaboration that was sparked on twitter and carried through using an entirely open toolset.

When we talk about open research practice, more efficient research communication, wider diversity of publication we always come up against the same problem. What’s in it for the jobbing scientist? This is so prevalent that it has been reformulated at “Singh’s Law” (by analogy with Godwin’s law) that any discussion of research practice will inevitably end when someone brings up career advancement or tenure.

A talk given in two slightly different forms at the NFAIS annual meeting 2010 (where I followed Clay Shirkey, hence the title) and at the Society for General Microbiology in Edinburgh in March. In the first case the talk was part of a panel of presentations intended to give the view of “scholars” to the information professionals. In the second it was part of a session looking at the application of web based tools to research and education.

Image via Wikipedia Richard Stallman and Richard Grant, two people who I wouldn’t ever have expected to group together except based on their first name, have recently published articles that have made me think about what we mean when we talk about “Open” stuff. In many ways this is a return right to the beginning of this blog, which started with a post in which I tried to define my terms as I understood them at the time.

Image via Wikipedia I had a bit of a rant at a Science Online London panel session on Saturday with Theo Bloom, Brian Derby, and Phil Lord which people seemed to like so it seemed worth repeating here. As usual when discussing scientific publishing the dreaded issue of the Journal Impact Factor came up. While everyone complains about metrics I’ve found that people in general seem remarkably passive when it comes to challenging their use.

If we imagine what the specification for building a scholarly communications system would look like there are some fairly obvious things we would want it to enable. Registration of priority, archival, re-use and replication, and filtering.