Being interested in all things science, one of the latest uses for Twitter that caught my eye has to do with Open Access repositories.

Tipped by fellow Twitter user Eloy Rodrigues (@cibertecario02), there are currently two open access repositories currently tweeting new deposits. They are Southhampton Univeristy’s ECS repository (@eprintsecs) and Minho University’s RepositoriUM (@repositorium).

I find this to be an interesting way of keeping up with the knowledge flow at universities or departments within universities. I hope to see other OA repositories join Twitter soon.

(HT: Cibertecario02)

Open access repositories one tweet at a time

The new repository government-supported site for hosting multiple repositories which is currently indexing over 13091 documents from 10 repositories has been announced as a project funded by the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and will be technically maintained by the National Scientific Computations Foundation (FCCN).

This looks like a cool project and I sincerely hope it gathers some momentum and becomes a useful resource.

The 10 repositories that are currently contributing to this main centralized repository are mainly university DSpace-based repositories or similar.
My university happens to show up on the list but is listed as contributing 0 documents. Yes, zero. Maybe it’s new.

This [zero docs] isn’t really a surprise since I had been considering submitting a proposal to set up a Dspace-based repository at my university earlier this year along with a buddy of mine. However, higher priority things took it’s place in my to-do list, like my thesis work.

Anyhow, I must congratulate everyone involved in this project and wish the best of luck. Maybe my thesis will be a part of this once it’s finally complete!

RCAAP – The Portuguese Scientific Open Access Repository

The tone of the article is pretty damning, but if you read it with non-sensitized eyes it’s not as bad as everyone seems to think. I showed it to non scientists and didn’t get the take the blogosphere did.

Considering that most (all) reactions came from science related bloggers, the resulting throughput of comments and blog posts was surely expected. After all, the article was published in a scientific magazine.

PLoS is simply going through the natural progression of a startup. It has solved the first puzzle: making something people want, which is open access journals. In so doing it has answered the question of whether or not a completely open journal can consistently produce high quality peer reviewed science. That answer, by the by, is hell yes.

I like the idea of PLoS as a startup that is keeping to it’s original goal while trying to work out the kinks regarding the open-access publishing model. And I agree, they have produced high quality peer reviewed science.

Read John Wilbanks’ post at his Nature Network.

Science Commons’ John Wilbanks on the Declan Butler article

Mac users have an award winning software application called Papers (not free) that is all the rage or even Yep (free?), the Linux gang have some options like Referencer that did a decent job of organizing and downloading metadata for the files. But Windows users were stuck with… well, expensive software packs like Endnote. Oh, and maybe Zotero that is a Firefox addon.

Well, it seems that this is not an issue anymore, someone has been hard at work and there is now a real option for Windows users (Mac & Linux too (sort of…)), it is called Mendeley.

Mendeley is still in closed beta but it is already packing a punch with some features that make it much more than just a paper manager. In their words:

Mendeley Desktop helps you to manage your research papers as easily as MP3s. When you import your research papers (in text PDF format), Mendeley Desktop will try to automatically extract the metadata (authors, title, journal, etc.), thus giving you a hand in setting up your digital library. In the next versions, we will also introduce Microsoft Word integration, OCR for converting your image PDFs, sharing and collaboration features, and exciting 3D visualizations of your library.

But Mendeley Desktop is just the starting point to get more out of your research papers. In the coming weeks and months, Mendeley Web will begin to provide you with personalized reading recommendations, statistics about your own publications, up-and-coming topics in your academic discipline, a network of fellow researchers, and much more

One of the cool features here is that there is a Desktop and a Web component that leverage the strengths of each platform. It will be interesting to see how the collaborative features in Mendeley Web work.
I’ve just began to use the software today so I can’t really get into any technical issues I may have noticed, but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks great. The user interface is functional and the overall design is also quite pleasant, on both Mendeley Desktop and Web.

The friendly folks at Mendeley have given me access to beta test their reference management application along with 20 no more invites for my readers. If you are interested in being a beta tester, feel free to comment below and I’ll send out invites first come, first served.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about Mendeley in the near future as the features start rolling out. Meanwhile, take a look at this demo (youtube) and let me know what you think about this app.

Mendeley = paper management + collaboration goodness

Aside from getting to know the great people responsible for creating OpenWetWare, I have had the opportunity to directly participate in this great project at a core level with the implementation of specific tools like the lab notebook and interact with the great community that makes OWW such an incredible online resource.

I have recently taken on the responsibility of spearheading the OWW Community blog where I’ll be publishing among many things, projects that take place on OWW, tips and tricks that can be used on the wiki, interesting news from the Open Science community and much more.

If you are interested in topics such as experimental biological research, sharing of scientific knowledge, web tools for collaborative research and other similar subjects, I recommend you subscribe to the OWW Community blog. I hope to see you there.

Also, if you happen to be a twitter user, feel free to follow my and/or OpenWetWare‘s tweets!

Last but not least, if you aren’t part of the OpenWetWare community yet, what are you waiting for?

Riding the open wave…

Here are some questions/topics they are interested in hearing about:

1. Do you have recommendations for alternative implementation approaches to those already reflected in the NIH Public Access Policy?

2. In light of the change in law that makes NIH’s public access policy mandatory, do you have recommendations for monitoring and ensuring compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy?

3. In addition to the information already posted at http://publicaccess.nih.gov/communications.htm, what additional information, training or communications related to the NIH Public Access Policy would be helpful to you?

Visit the site and leave a comment.

NIH wants to hear from you

FasterCures is a nonprofit organization dedicated to “saving lives by saving time”.

Their contributions to making scientific information accessible via the openness that is characteristic of SC but also via the use of semantic web technology, is making a strong contribution to scientific research.

And if you happen to be wondering what semantic web is… here’s a snippet from the SC blog.

In the simplest terms, it’s a way to mark research data so computers can help us make sense of it. The driving concept is that collaboration in science needs to make a shift from human-mediated to computer-mediated, from single-database access to data integration, from reading papers by people to reading papers with machines, and so on.

Semantic Science Commons makes FasterCures top list

Google Research (research.google.com) will soon be a massive repository of scientific data with hundreds of terabytes at our disposal.

Although there is still very little information about this, it looks like a promising endeavor that will certainly amuse the scientific community. Statistics have shown that technological advances come hand in hand with exponential accumulation of data. So, this will certainly come in handy.

Let’s see what the terms and conditions of such database usage are and then I’ll give my 2 cents worth of opinion. Until then, I can only see this as good news…

On a side note, this is obviously going to sprout another posting frenzy by the paranoid privacy bloggers and their Google-is-in-to-get-you mumbo-jumbo!

Google Research to become massive science data repository

The names vary and so do the methods through which the knowledge is shared but it’s great to see that there are various attempts to push this movement forward with great projects like Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem, MIT’s OpenWetWare, Rosie Redfield’s RRResearch and many others which I’ll mention in later posts.

I truly believe that open access to scientific information via the immense weave that is called the Internet will be the way of the future and I hope to be among those that contribute to it.

Keep posted, more open science goodness on it’s way…

Opening the way for Science

Gago…? Uhm… could it be Mr Mariano Gago? The Portuguese Minister of Science and Technology?

Guess what, it was and here’s the video (about 7 minutes long) where Minister Gago speaks about the importance of Open Access in scientific research and other aspects related.

And while I’m at it, I must say that I’m rather impressed by the quality of his spoken English.

I for one am proud that this is a matter being kept in focus by the Portuguese Government. I’d like to read a bit more about the Minister’s initiatives regarding OA here in Portugal. Anyone from my Portuguese readership want to point me in the right direction?

[HT: SC blog]
[Video via CabTube]

Portuguese Minister Mariano Gago on Open Access