in PLOS - parody of Lady Gaga's "Applause"

"We're touched and can't stop laughing after watching this video made by grad students at UCB D-lab. Highly recommended!" (PLOS)

ORIGINAL: DLab Follies

IEEE OA: The Case for Open Access Publishing

ORIGINAL: IEEE
May 24, 2013

Findability. Credibility. Flexibility. At IEEE, we believe in empowering our authors to make their research freely available through open access publishing. Check out why open access matters to authors, researchers and the public in our video, or stop by open.ieee.org to learn more.

PLOS ONE Launches Synthetic Biology Collection

ORIGINAL: PLOS ONE

By Rachel Bernstein

August 15, 2012

Image Credit: Ivan Morozov (Virginia Bioinformatics Institute)

Today PLOS ONE is happy to announce the launch of the Synthetic Biology Collection, including over 50 papers published in the last six years that illustrate the many facets of this dynamically evolving research area.

Synthetic biology is an innovative emerging field that exists at the intersection of many traditional disciplines, including biology, chemistry, and engineering, with aims to create biological systems that can be programmed to do useful things like produce drugs or biofuels, among other applications. Despite its potential, the heavily interdisciplinary nature of the research can make it difficult to publish in traditional discipline-specific journals.

However, PLOS ONE’s broad scope allows for the publication of work crossing many traditional research boundaries, making it an ideal venue for many different types of synthetic biology research. For example, the papers in the collection cover topics including DNA synthesis and assembly, standardized biological “parts” akin to interchangeable mechanical parts, protein engineering, and complex network and pathway analysis and modeling, as described in the Collection Overview written by collection editors Jean Peccoud of Virginia Tech and Mark Isalan of the Centre for Genomic Regulation.

The Collection has roots in PLOS ONE’s very first issue, which included two publications from the field. Since then, the number of synthetic biology articles published in the journal has grown steadily. The collection launched today highlights selected synthetic biology articles published in PLOS ONE since 2006, and it is intended to be a growing resource that will be updated regularly with new papers as the field continues to grow and develop.

Collection Citation: Synthetic Biology (2012) PLOS

Collections:http://www.ploscollections.org/syntheticbiology

Report calls on government to back open access science

ORIGINAL: BBC

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Currently the results of publicly funded research are restricted and have to be paid for

A group of experts has urged funders of UK research to encourage scientists to publish their results in journals that offer free public access to findings.

A report by Dame Janet Finch argues that there is a powerful "moral" case for publicly funded research to be freely available.

Dame Janet also states that there could be considerable economic benefits if industry has free access to research.

Currently, most results have to be paid for by subscription.

But supporters of commercial publishing say that they have contributed greatly to the development of the peer review system and the resulting high standard of scientific research.

According to Dame Janet, "everyone agrees that greater open access would bring huge economic and public benefits. The challenge though is how we move to this model without damaging UK research, peer review or scientific publishers?"

Historically, scientists have sent their research results to scientific journals for consideration for publication.

Specialist editors working for the journals sift through the material submitted to them and select those they feel have made a significant contribution to the field.

“The long term future lies with open access”

Dame Janet FinchReport Author

The editors then send these scientific papers to experts in the field for assessment, a process known as peer review. It is at this stage that one or more of the experts can reject the research because they believe it is flawed or that it has not made a significant contribution to the field.

It is more often the case though that the expert reviewers, known as referees, ask for clarification or more experiments to be carried out.

Once all or most of the referees are satisfied, the journal publishes the research and it is at this stage that the work is formally considered to be new science.

This process is in the main carried out by commercially-owned academic publishers who charge a subscription for access to the research. Two of the world's leading journals, Nature and Science, require subscriptions.

Critics allege that commercial publishers have made excessive profits from publicly funded research 

Critics have argued that commercial publishers have made excessive profits from scientific research that has been paid for from public money. Critics also say that denying access to publicly-funded research is immoral.

This sort of criticism has seen the emergence of a new model of scientific publishing called open access. In this model, the author - or more likely their institution or funding body - pays for the administrative costs of peer review and the published research is made freely available to all.

The issue has become more acute in recent years with all research papers now potentially available online. Most commercial publishers have a "pay-wall" requiring a fee before allowing access to the research material.

Last year the Science Minister David Willetts set up an independent working group led by Dame Janet Finch of Manchester University to examine how to expand access to the peer-reviewed publications that arise from research undertaken both in the UK and in the rest of the world.

Bob Campbell, a senior publisher at Wiley-Blackwell, said that he saw a cointinued role for commercial publishers, but that there would be a move towards some form of open access in their models.

Measured way

The report's conclusion is that the government should encourage research funders, scientists and journal publishers to back the open access model playing an increasingly important role in scientific publishing.

Although open access journals currently account for just 10% of published research it is an area that Dame Finch wants to see expanding rapidly.

“Open access is is in our marrow. Greater access is for the greater good”

Professor Adam TickelBirmingham University

"The long term future lies with open access," she said at a news conference to launch her report.

"It will continue to grow fast. We need to embrace this change and do so in a measured way.

One of Dame Janet's recommendations is to require the funders of research to set aside £60 million each year to pay the administrative fees for publication in open access publications.

Mr Willetts said he would give a formal government response after he had a chance to properly consider the report.

But after an initial reading he said it seemed to have struck a "sensible balance in safeguarding the very important role of academic publishers while finding a way to manage the change to an environment that is more dominated by open access".

Many scientists are strong supporters of open access publishing. Among them is Prof Elizabeth Fisher, a world class neuroscientist at University College London.

"At my institution we are lucky enough to have access to many journals. But inevitably myself or one of my colleagues occasionally needs to see something that we haven't subscribed to and so we have to pay a fee to see research that has been publicly funded.

"So it would be tremendously useful for our research if we didn't have to think twice about this sort of thing".

Professor Adam Tickell, pro-vice-chancellor for research and knowledge transfer at the University of Birmingham said that universities were hugely supportive of the move toward the new model of scientific publishing.

"Open access is is in our marrow," he said, "greater access is for the greater good".

Follow Pallab on Twitter

Petitions about Free Access to Tax Funded Research; Animal Abuse, Shut down Nuclear Reactors

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research

ORIGINAL: CLIK HERE Require Free Access Over Internet Scientific Journal Articles Arising Taxpayer Funded Research 

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

Make all animal abuse a felony for every convicted case of abuse in all states.

ORIGINAL: CLIK HERE Make-all-animal-abuse-felony-every-convicted-case-abuse-all-states

The petition asks that animal cruelty laws be made stronger. We want all convicted cases to be felonies in every state in this country. We are their voice and every living being deserves to be treated humanely. I believe with this done it will also help with people who abuse children and women. No abuse is right and therefore should be prosecuted to the fullest.

Created: May 17, 2012

shut down ALL nuclear reactors 1 at a time, safety as the reason. Must be made to withstand Earthquakes / Tsunamis.

ORIGINAL: CLIK HERE Shut-down-all-nuclear-reactors-1-time-safety-reason-must-be-made-withstand-earthquakes-tsunamis

Recently, (May 5 2012) Japan has announced the SHUT DOWN of its final nuclear power plant.

The entire country is now operating free from nuclear power.

Here is the MSM news story confirmation released May 5, 2012:

Thousands march as Japan shuts off nuclear power

This petition of redress to the Whitehouse, specifically to President Obama, is aimed to mimic the reduction, and eventual ELIMINATION of all nuclear power plants within the Continental United States of America.

The shutdown process: Close each nuclear plant when it comes up for safety review. The reason for shutdown will be for the plant to assure it is 100% earthquake / tsunami proof.

If the plant is not deemed 100% Earthquake / Tsunami proof, then it will be permanently closed

The Scandal of Closed Access to Taxpayer Funded Research

ORIGINAL: Samirchopra

by Samir Chopra

May22

On January 21, Timothy Gowers of Cambridge announced he would no longer publish papers in Elsevier’s journals or serve as a referee or editor for them. This boycott has now been joined by thousands of other researchers. (I don’t referee any more for Elsevier, though I have in the past, and I certainly won’t be sending any papers there.) Thanks to the furore created by three Fields Medal winners–Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao, Wendelin Werner–participating in the boycott, many now know what academics have known for a very long time: academic publishing is a scandal. Indeed, it is more than a scandal; it is a racket which is nothing short of criminal. Before we go any further, here is a number to chew on: in 2010, ‘Elsevier reported a 36 percent profit on revenues of $3.2 billion.’

How does this system work? Consider this. Elsevier, or for that matter, any journal publishing house, publishes ‘content.’ Academic content, the results of research conducted by university academics the world over; much of this research is funded by taxpayer money. This research is written up in papers, and sent to journal editorial boards for review. These boards are staffed by unpaid academics, who, after preliminary review, send out papers to be reviewed by other unpaid academics. (When I say ‘unpaid,’ I mean they are not compensated by the journals for their work.) The paper, if accepted by the referee and the editor, is then sent back to the authors who typesets it, prepares a camera-ready copy, and sends it back for publishing. The publishing house, after making authors sign forms handing over copyright to them, then prints the article in the latest issue of the relevant journal, and sells subscriptions to that journal for thousands of dollars per year to libraries at the same universities where their editorial board and reviewing staff work.

So, this material is not open-access any more; it is closed behind a ‘pay-wall.’ If you don’t have a paid subscription, you don’t get to view the published research. If your library, at say, a public university like the City University of New York, is experiencing budget problems, and library funding suffers cutbacks, well, tough tits. You don’t get to view the published research. If you, as a professor, or graduate student, decided to freely distribute the papers, you may be embroiled in copyright infringement disputes. If you are a taxpayer that funded this research, but cannot afford the journal subscription, well, tough tits again. Go rustle up the bucks. Knowledge should be open and available to all, you say? Talk to my accountant; because the face, it ain’t listening.

This is a gigantic rip-off, a racket, a robbery. It is exploitation–primarily of the academic promotion and tenure process and taxpayer money–on a scale that beggars belief. The stench from this should make every thinking person hold his or her nose. And act to make sure this cannot persist.

Right now, the US House and Senate are considering the Federal Research Public Access Act; this will bring about ‘pervasive open access,’ especially to articles reporting on research paid for by taxpayers. For your own sake and for the sake of researchers, students, teachers, doctors, and the like everywhere, please support it. A ‘We the People’ petition is up and available for signing at whitehouse.gov. Please sign, spread the word, and end this racket.

www.access2research.org

Open sesame

ORIGINAL: The Economist

Apr 14th 2012

When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge

PUBLISHING obscure academic journals is that rare thing in the media industry: a licence to print money. An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100. In 2011 Elsevier, the biggest academic-journal publisher, made a profit of £768m ($1.2 billion) on revenues of £2.1 billion. Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals’ content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research.

Publishers insist that high prices are necessary to ensure quality and cover the costs of managing the peer-review process, editing and distribution. High margins, they say, are evidence of their efficiency. Clearly the cost of producing a journal is not zero. But the internet means it should be going down, not up. Over the past decade many online journals and article repositories have emerged that are run on a shoestring. Some have been set up by academics who are unhappy with the way academic publishing works. (Since January some 9,500 researchers have joined a boycott of Elsevier.) In several cases the entire editorial boards of existing journals have resigned to start new ones with lower prices and less restricted access.

But the incumbent journals are hard to dislodge. Researchers want their work to appear in the most renowned journals to advance their careers. Those journals therefore have the pick of the best papers, remain required reading in their fields and have strong pricing power as a result. What is to be done?

There is a simple way both to increase access to publicly funded research and to level the playing field for new journals. Government bodies that fund academic research should require that the results be made available free to the public. So should charities that fund research. This would both broaden access to research and strengthen the hand of “open access” journals, since many researchers would then be unable to publish results in closed ones.

Publish or perish

There are some hopeful signs. The British government plans to mandate open access to state-funded research. The Wellcome Trust, a medical charity that pumps more than £600m ($950m) a year into research, already requires open access within six months of publication, but the compliance rate is only 55%. The charity says it will “get tough” on scientists who publish in journals that restrict access, for example by withholding future grants, and is also launching its own open-access journal. In America, a recent attempt (backed by journal publishers) to strike down the existing requirement that research funded by the National Institutes of Health should be made available to all online has failed. That is good news, but the same requirement should now be extended to all federally funded research.

Open access to research funded by taxpayers or charities need not mean Armageddon for journal publishers. Some have started to embrace open access in limited ways, such as letting academics post their papers on their own websites or putting time limits on their pay barriers. But a strongly enforced open-access mandate for state- and charity-funded research would spur them to do more. The aim of academic journals is to make the best research widely available. Many have ended up doing the opposite. It is time that changed.

Dificultades en "Abrir la Ciencia": Entrevista con Michael Nielsen

ORIGINAL: TEDxWaterloo

"Un boicot es solo parte de lo que es necesario que suceda: se necesitan igualmente acciones positivas, no solo acuerdos en lo que no se debe hacer"

En una charla oportuna e incisiva en TEDxWaterloo, Michael Nielsen expuso el tema de la ciencia abierta( o de libre acceso o pública): "la idea de que los datos de investigación y sus resultados deberían estar disponibles al público, y que los científicos deben colaborar más libremente entre sí y con el público".

Luego de esta charla, su libro, Reinventando el Descubrimiento, ha sido publicado, e incluso, más recientemente, el Congreso de EE.UU. ha introducido una legislación polémica que prohibe la financiación de organizaciones que requieren el acceso abierto a su investigación. Ben Lillie de TED llamó a Nielsen para hablar de las políticas y las dificultades de la ciencia abierta.

Su charla tuvo una significativa aceptación en la comunidad científica y otras personas han empezado a discutir la idea de la ciencia abierta. ¿Has visto que la gente que se mueve más hacia esta idea de hacer ciencia abierta, o al menos -Quiero decir, el objetivo aquí es iniciar una conversación y conseguir que haga parte de las cosas sobre las que la gente está hablando. ¿Está sucediendo esto?

Sí, creo que sin duda va en ascenso. El término "open science" era, creo, bastante raro, incluso hace tres o cuatro años. Es un término muy antiguo. Ciertamente, ha estado en uso durante muchas décadas, posiblemente incluso siglos. Sin embargo, es no es algo de lo que la gente hablaba mucho, hasta los últimos dos años.

Supongo que he hecho unas 30 charlas en siete países en los últimos dos meses, y en particular en el Reino Unido, por lo que realmente parece que hay una cantidad enorme de conciencia. Organizaciones como la Royal Society están haciendo investigaciones en "ciencia abierta". El Wellcome Trust, un organismo de financiación muy grande, sin duda ha hecho una cantidad enorme por ella durante muchos años. En los Estados Unidos, también parece ser un interés creciente. Hay más artículos en los principales medios de comunicación de los que había-bien, había muy pocos artículos hasta hace unos años. Pero ahora parece que hay un poco más de cobertura, y sitios más especializados-Wired, y semejantes.