Responsibility and openness

Hilary Sutcliffe (RRI specialist) recently made me aware of an article by Arie Rip published in the Journal of Responsible Innovation. At the time of our twitter exchange the article was not openly available, so Stephen Curry (Open access specialist) sent me a copy. The article is entitled ‘The clothes of the emperor. An essay …

The impact of impact

This article by Ernesto Priego first appeared in Research Information and is reposted here with the author’s permission. It is based on a presentation at the UKSG conference (Connecting the Knowledge Community) earlier this month. Ernesto also maintains a blog on Digital Scholarship. The article complements an old blog post of mine on impact, but …

Bring on the Yawns: Time to Expose Science’s “Dirty Little Secret”

Guest post by visiting fellow, Jeff Tamblyn, film maker and director of Kansas vs. Darwin. As a visiting fellow in the “Making Science Public” project, I’ve had a great first week at the University of Nottingham, filled by conversations with social science scholars and capped off with the events of May Fest – a day in …

The end of journals? Open access, impact and the production of knowledge

Under direction from the government, there is a drive to make publicly funded research open access; that is, if you go to the website where the journal article resides, non-subscribers will not be met by a page asking you to part with $30+ for the privilege of reading. Research articles will be free to read….but …

Big Data: Challenges and opportunities

With increasing frequency one can read announcements welcoming us to the age of Big Data (put the phrase “welcome to the age of big data” into google and you’ll get over 488,000 results). Reading about two recent events in particular sharpened my awareness of this new era, namely a big data event at the British …

Metaphor, image and now visualisation: Darwin’s tree of life

Yesterday I came across this tweet: “Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins Zooming into the Tree of Life. Magnificent piece of software, brilliantly intuitive visualisation of the tree of life http://bit.ly/PJyox3 Retweeted by Eric Sawyer” This led me to a fascinating interactive and fractal representation of the tree of life (or phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree) created by …

Open access – what’s out there?

Open access is a hot topic. It is almost impossible to keep up with what is being written about it. In this ‘Making Science Public’ blog post we attempt to collate some of the many issues surrounding ‘Open Access’ to publicly-funded research.  We have grouped the resources into five sections: Policy Positions, Publishers and Publication, …

Open data, trust and data/visual literacy

Two reports When I opened my twitter timeline on 21 June, a stream of tweets announced the publication of two reports relating to open access and open data: The Royal Society’s report on Science as a Public Enterprise (plus an article about it in the THE and a Nature news blog) and the RCUK’s Open …