Wednesday, January 26, 2011

A must read for anyone interested in #OpenScience: Peter Suber's review of 2010

Some ego surfing (i.e., searching for my own name) led me to discover a very useful resource / summary of open access advances from 2010.  The resource is a posting from Peter Suber from the SPARC Open Access newsletter from 1/2/2011.  I found out about the posting from here: BioSharing: Top 10 openness advances of 2010 - BioTorrents because they noted that something from my lab was one of the picks ...

Suber, if you do not know, is one of the sages of Open Access having been promoting and discussing and working on Open Access for many many years.  In the post, he discusses what he calls "a
feast of the OA highlights from 2010".  The whole post is worth reading are here is a summary:

Top 10 advances

  • (1) Open access policies at funding agencies
  • (2) Open access policies at universities
  • (3) Some growth numbers
  • (4) Open access archiving (green OA)
  • (5) Open access journals (gold OA)
  • (6) Data
    • I note in this section he says "The most exciting new open-data platform in 2010 was BioTorrents from Morgan Langille and Jonathan Eisen, a P2P data-sharing service for biology using BitTorrent.  Something like this will be needed in every field where researchers need to share not just megabytes or gigabytes, but terabytes and petabytes."
    • That made my month - see our PLoS One paper on it here. 
  • (7) Books and digitization
  • (8) Copyright and licensing
  • (9) Effects of the recession
  • (10) Some highlights of the highlights
The last section is particularly entertaining as he discusses the worst and best of 2010
  • Worst includes 
    • James Murdoch objecting to the British Library opening up its archives;
    • English Heritage for claiming to own the copyright on Stonehenge,
    • Todd Platts, Republican representative from Pennsylvania for an inane copyright idea
    • Supposedly OA journals not using actual OA licenses
    • BP, for a very non open contract for research relating to the oil spill
  • Best includes
    • Biotorrents
    • Obama White House
    • UC standing up to Nature
    • many new OA mandates around the world
    • many others


He also posts links to his discussions from previous years.  Anyone interested in OA really should read his full post ...

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