Free Science -- Resources & Reading

This is a supplement to my article "Free Science, One Paper at a Time" (at my webpage; at my blog at Wired). Some of these links were suggested by others. Many came from a longer set of links on open science (saved under tag Mendeley; my own shorthand tag for the story) that I saved at Diigo.

Views from the open-science community

Jonathan Eisen is serially recording his quest to publish his dad's papers; one result is Howard Eisen's Mendeley page.  You'll find some of the most thoughtful explorations of open science issues at the blogs of Cameron Neylon (e.g, What would scholarly communications look like if we invented it today?) and Michael Nielsen. See also Peter Murray-Rust, Leslie Carr, and the blog at Mendeley. Meanwhile, in video land, Tim Berners-Lee talks Open Data at TED, and a session on open science I organized at ScienceOnline 2011 was captured instream.

Others: 

• Scientific Data Sharing runs articles and interviews about open science.
• Nature's eResearch blog discusses Replacing the Paper: The Twelve Rs of the e-Research Record.
• Tom Bartlett suggests we just stop.
• Journalist Martin Robbins considers whether open science is about to take off.
• The alt-metrics manifesto elaborates the argument and path for using additional ways to measure scientific reputation and contributions.  

 Tools

Those wanting to open up their own science should of course check out Mendeley. Its Binary Battle offers a prize of $10,001 for the best open science app built using Mendeley data. Mendeley's Advanced Search lets you limit your search of the Mendeley catalog to Open Access articles only (tick "Only search articles available via OpenAccess").  You'll want to read How to Get Started in Open Science.

And the day after I published my article, by chance, the Royal Society launched a new initiative on openness in science, which featured a nice post by Jessica Bland.

Others:

• Liquid Publications hopes to make science more fluid; highly interesting project. ORCID seeks a new model of tracking reputation. 
• KnowledgeBlog is a scholarly publishing platform being built atop Wordpress. Annotum is another. 
• Michael Nielsen recommends Zooniverse as "a good accessible starting point for people to get involved in doing open science." 
• DataCite helps researchers turn datasets into citable doi links. 
• BioTorrents, run by Eisen lab post-doc Morgan Langille, creates file-sharing torrents for large science datasets. 
• Amazon S3 will store and host, for free, any datasets you make public. 
• Science Commons, a Creative Commons project, provides some other resources for doing open science.