Open Science Feed

Sign-ups to FediScience.org, the Mastodon server for publishing scientists, have exploded today. We probably had more sign-ups today than in 2022 before.

Like with email you have to pick a server to sign-up and then you can talk to (almost) everyone. Here is a list of options for people interested in science, academia, GLAM, etc. https://fediscience.org/server-list.html

Translated versions available in Spanish, French, Magyar, Portuguese and Chinese.

Lofi published this on Reddit asking:

I came across this paper - https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.202255841 (through r/Open_Access_tracking)

It made me think: Most of the discourse I know about research materials and open science is centered around the idea of public access.

But maybe public access is not vital? What do you think about providing controlled, on-demand access? I mean, public access is preferable, but in practice, public access deters some scientists (due to various reasons, not necessarily IP as the paper assumes), and so we are ending with no access at all. Perhaps providing some access is better than nothing.

What do you think - would society benefit from such on-demand access or should we insist on public access only?

Open Neuroscience is organising a small session on October 26th 18:00 UK time to discuss what are good ways/best infrastructure to manage content (ie how do we make it interoperable, user friendly, easy to move/copy/replicate, etc).

They will host Jonny Saunders to learn about their amazing efforts in curating information with wikis (eg Auto-Pi-lot Wiki) and other distributed infrastructure systems, and follow that up with an open chat/discussion session. You can sign up here.

The US government has issued a new policy that in future, all government funded research will have to be made freely accessible to the public. However, they have not specified how this will be achieved, and publishers are pushing for a model in which the current system continues unchanged except that the authors and institutions pay the publishers rather than readers. This is a form of open access, but the excessively high prices they charge mean that it would exclude many from being able to publish their work in these publishers' journals. In other words, this policy which is supposed to create equitable access would have the unintended consequence of making participation in research itself less equitable.

We are calling on the US government to make sure that their policy is implemented in a way that allows everyone to participate equally in research, not just read it. Since this is likely to shake up the old business models of publishers, we further call on the US government to support or build a publicly funded and freely available publishing infrastructure to guarantee to all the ability to participate in research, and to create the conditions for a lively and innovative ecosystem of new approaches to publishing, better adapted to the modern world.

Sign the letter now, share this article, or read on for more details and references.