[Open] Science Sunday – 20.12.09

Great things to share this Sunday thanks to the magic of the internet and open access….

The good

There are some good news around Open Access:

First, last week Nat Torkington alerted me of this link. The first paragraph of the summary states

“With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies.”

Some commenting around this issue can be found in the Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog. (via @BoraZ on twitter). It is great to see the OSTP having started this discussion, and I will be interested to see where this leads to.

With the year coming to an end, nothing like summarizing what has been achieved, and here is a post summarizing how 2009 was a great year for Open Access (also via @BoraZ)

And it was great to hear about the new partnership between ResearchBlogging.org and PLoS. Nice!

The ‘How is this Reasonable?”

There is a post by Martin Fenner describing a talk on Open Access he gave at his University. I especially liked this extract:

“Reuse of a figure or table in an academic seminar usually falls under fair use, but many journals still require a (free) permission. And using the same figure in a medical conference can cost several hundred dollars, and it doesn’t really matter that you are one of the authors of the paper”

I did not know that use of my own figures at a conference did not fall under fair use. It’s just not right.

But this is even worse:

Who could oppose non-profit blind/disabled groups helping disabled people get access to written work?

You can find the answer in BoingBoing.

Back to the good: Cornell University

Cornell University Library partners with the Internet archive (heard through Open Access News). Absolutely priceless gems can be found here! There is nothing like dusting off the cobwebs of some old journal issues and reading the scientific discoveries as they were described originally by the scientists themselves. Cornell University has made this a lot easier.

Cornell University has a great series of videos on YouTube, including a really interesting one on bird’s songs. (By the way, wonderful description of feathers in Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog.)

The Cornell lab of Ornithology also runs a great Citizen Science programme. (Dave Munger has a wonderful post about Citizen Science in Seed Magazine.)

Finally,

OK, granted, I didn’t get this tweet from @sciencebase this week, but it is really so worth it! So, if you are not up to becoming a citizen scientist you might still be up for some quirky science party tricks. (If you like this video, there is more at Richard Wiseman’s Blog)