John Willinsky, from the University of British Columbia, makes an excellent point in his recent article “What open access research can do for Wikipedia“. Wikipedia‘s goal is to be a universally freely accessible encyclopedia of human knowledge. A central aspect of Wikipedia’s is that it does not contain original research, but rather, it aims to… Read more »
The recent panel on open access/semantic web/web 2.0 at South by Southwest was well attended and prompted lively discussion. Also, this being South by Southwest, several of the attendees immediately blogged their notes on the panel – handy for those who couldn’t make it to Austin. One interesting coincidence of timing was that right in… Read more »
If you are an advocate of open access to the scientific literature, you can now wear you heart on your sleeve by ordering any of BioMed Central, Chemistry Central or PhysMath Central’s T-shirts. If you are an author, editor and/or peer reviewer for one of BioMed Central’s independent journals, we have created logo T-shirts for each… Read more »
I’m currently en route to Austin, Texas which, as well as being the setting for one of my all time favourite films, also hosts a renowned series of annual festivals on film, music and interactive media. I’m fortunate enough to be partipating in this year’s interactive media event, taking part in a panel organized by… Read more »
Tagging (allowing users to assign their own short keywords to items on the web) has taken off through its use on sites such as del.ic.ious (for web bookmarks) and Flickr (for digital photographs). Tagging is also a great fit for scientific research articles, and its use in this way was pioneered by CiteULike, and later… Read more »
Some good news for researchers applying for grants from the recently launched European Research Council (ERC).The council’s grant application guidelines confirm that publication costs (such as BioMed Central article processing charges) can be included as part of the direct costs of the grant. ERC funding also includes an indirect component, and BioMed Central encourages institutions… Read more »