Image via Wikipedia Quite some months ago an article in Cancer Therapy and Biology by Scott Kern of Johns Hopkins kicked up an almighty online stink.

Image via Wikipedia Peter Murray-Rust has sparked off another round in the discussion of the value that publishers bring to the scholarly communication game and told a particular story of woe and pain inflicted by the incumbent publishers. On the day he posted that I had my own experience of just how inefficient and ineffective our communication systems are by wasting the better part of the day trying to find some information.

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The three organisations aim to establish a new journal that will attract and define the very best research publications from across these fields.

As a wooly headed social liberal with a strong belief in the power of the internet to connect people it is probably natural for to me have some sympathy for the ideas behind the “Big Society” espoused by the UK Prime Minister.

On Monday 30 May I gave evidence at a European Commission hearing on Access to Scientific Information. This is the text that I spoke from. Just to re-inforce my usual disclaimer I was not speaking on behalf of my employer but as an independent researcher. We live in a world where there is more information available at the tips of our fingers than even existed 10 or 20 years ago.

Michael Nielsen is a good friend as well as being an inspiration to many of us in the Open Science community. I’ve been privileged to watch and in a small way to contribute to the development of his arguments over the years and I found the distillation of these years of effort into the talk that he recently gave at TEDxWaterloo entirely successful.

The following is the text from which I spoke today at the .Astronomy conference. I think there is some video available on the .Astronomy UStream account and I also have audio which I will put up somewhere soon. There’s a funny thing about the science and coding communities. Each seems to think that the other has all the answers.

What seems like an age ago a group of us discussed a different way of doing scientific research.

One of the things we want the Open Research Computation journal to do is bring more of the transparency and open critique that characterises the best Open Source Software development processes into the scholarly peer review process. But you can talk about changing the way peer review works and you can actively do something about. Michael Barton and Hazel Barton have taken matters into their own hands and thrown the doors completely open.

So my previous post on peer review hit a nerve. Actually all of my posts on peer review hit a nerve and create massive traffic spikes and I’m still really unsure why. The strength of feeling around peer review seems out of all proportion to both its importance and indeed the extent to which people understand how it works in practice across different disciplines.