Science

Three years ago, I wrote about JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. JoVE was a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. I recently discovered that since 2009, JoVE is now just a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. You can debate at length on whether JoVE was Open Access (as I thought) or not. I just think it’s sad although I understand their motives: in a recent exchange with them, they wrote they “handle most production of our content [themselves] and it is a very very costly operation”. ...

A colleague of mine is always hammering home the message of bringing facts and data to a discussion rather than rumors, hearsays and daily newspaper articles. Since a few days (because H1N1 is not a pandemic anymore?), newspapers are coming with another “Superbug” or " Germinator", wrongly named " NDM-1". So, before spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, please read the scientific litterature or, at least, read quality newspapers ( articles from The Guardian are quite fair and balanced). ...

BioMed Central is one of the main Open Access publishers in the world of Science, Technology and Medicine. On a side note, that’s where I published my two articles (in Proteome Science and the Journal of Circadian Rhythms). One might think that, given their support to Open Access, they would also support Open Source software and Open Format documents. For the software side, it’s not very clear. Although they ask authors to consider releasing software described in publications under a free (or at least open source) license, they also support and advertise for a bunch of proprietary software. While it’s not a bad thing per se (it enlarges the number of potential authors), it’s sad to see they don’t cite popular free software like OpenOffice.org (to write your article), Gimp (to edit your figures) or Zotero (for reference management). These are the three main software in each category but the free software world has many more of them! ...

While looking for pictures related to patents, I found these interesting ones taken by Daneel Ariantho on Flickr. They depict a virtual conference about scientific patents. It could be interesting to get more information about 1) the content of this conference and 2) the kind of conferences organized in these virtual worlds. It could also be interesting to see the social aspects of these conferences (are your contact better/different in a virtual conference?) and the “quality control” (of speakers, of posters, of advertizers, …).