Weekly digest: what’s happening in open science?

Amy Williams

Featuring the proposal of an unlikely friendship between commercial publishers and open science advocates, guidelines for sharing research outputs, and a new open data tool.

Making friends with the corporate bogeyman  via Hindawi

Corporate and for-profit institutions, publishers in particular, are often met with hostility by members of the open science movement. This thoughtful piece examines how, by moving away from the proprietary focus of many current publishers, Hindawi aims to find a solution in open infrastructure with which both open science advocates and publishers can be happy.

The importance of sharing research outputs via The Publication Plan

This brief article highlights a recently posted preprint that provides guidelines for best practice in sharing industry-sponsored abstracts, slides, oral presentations and posters, with a focus on authorship, transparency and ease of access. If you are interested in these goals, you too can join the conversation!

Using open data to facilitate research and help patients via the EBM DataLab

It’s all very well and good advocating open data, but it’s important to start using it too. This newly launched tool from the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) DataLab contains prescribing data in the UK going all the way back to 1998. This tool is open to all and free to use.

How open access helps developing economies via the World Bank

The key findings of studies on the benefits of open access research for society, academia and the economy in developing countries.

Stephen Hawking’s thesis and the importance of open access via The Conversation

The massive popularity of Stephen Hawking’s newly available PhD thesis last week was so intense that the traffic surge crashed the repository on which it was hosted. This article takes the opportunity of open access’s presence in the headlines to give a comprehensive overview of the open access landscape today, why it is like it is, and why open access is such an important goal to keep striving for.

Introducing BMC data notes via the BMC blog network

BioMed Central (BMC) have recently introduced a new output offering data notes to help improve the visibility of open datasets, and support the reuse and sharing of data by giving a short, open access summary of the dataset.

Open in order to…  via F1000 blogs

Martin Elliott, contributing to the #openinorderto Twitter campaign, speaks about how open research promotes trust and transparency in medical research, and how these values have driven the development of UCL Child Health Open Research.

Image copyright Gilberto Graham 2013: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gilberto Graham.jpg