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Author Cameron Neylon

I’m afraid I went to bed. It was getting on for midnight and it looked like another four hours or so before the petition would reach the magic mark of 25,000 signatures. As it turns out a final rush put us across the line at around 2am my time, but never mind, I woke up wondering whether we had got there, headed for the computer and had a pleasant surprise waiting for me. What does this mean?

Published
Author Cameron Neylon

Yesterday David Willetts, the UK Science and Universities Minister gave a speech to the Publishers Association that has got wide coverage. However it is worth pulling apart both the speech and the accompanying opinion piece from the Guardian because there are some interesting elements in there, and also some things have got a little confused. The first really key point is that there is nothing new here.

Published
Author Cameron Neylon

Github for science sounds like a great plan? But do we have the underlying stack of equivalent services needed to provide “http for science” and “tcp/ip” for science. I argue that until we do we will struggle to really deliver on the excitement that examples (rightly) inspire.

Published
Author Cameron Neylon

Prior to all the nonsense with the Research Works Act, I had been having a discussion with Heather Morrison about licenses and Open Access and peripherally the principle of requiring specific licenses of authors. I realized then that I needed to lay out the background thinking that leads me to where I am. There is little new here in any sense but it remains a perspective that very few people really get.

Published
Author Cameron Neylon

Image via Wikipedia When the history of the Research Works Act, and the reaction against it, is written that history will point at the factors that allowed smart people with significant marketing experience to walk with their eyes wide open into the teeth of a storm that thousands of people would have predicted with complete confidence. That story will detail two utterly incompatible world views of scholarly communication.

Published
Author Cameron Neylon

Image via Wikipedia In my last post on scholarly publishers that support the US Congress SOPA bill I ended up making a series of edits. It was pointed out to me that the Macmillan listed as a supporter is not the Macmillan that is the parent group of Nature Publishing Group but a separate U.S. subsidiary of the same ultimate holding company, Holtzbrinck.

Published
Author Cameron Neylon

Image via Wikipedia One of the things you notice as a visitor from the UK in South Africa is how clean the toilets are. In restaurants, at the University, in public places. Sometimes a bit worn down but always clean. And then you start to notice how clear and clean the pavements are and your first response, well at least my first response, is that this is a sign of things going right. One element of the whole is working well.