About Author: Kelly Thormodson

Posts by Kelly Thormodson

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ResearchGate – Social Media for Scientists

By
Kelly Thormodson
– January 29, 2012Posted in: Alternative Publishing Models, Open Access

Referred to as Facebook for scientists, ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net/) is a new way for scientists to communicate. Created by Ijad Madisch, this resource allows scientists to create profile pages, comment, join groups, find job listings, link and follow other scientists and pose and answer scientific questions. Many open access articles are also shared within this resource. It is a great place to stay on top of research in a specific topic area.

In 2011, over 1.5 million connections were made between experts on a variety of fields from medicine to physics to biology to engineering to psychology to religious studies to economics to computer science and more. It helps people connect worldwide on like subject areas and in many cases they end up collaborating on projects and papers. To read more about ResearchGate and the idea of looking at the scientific process in a new light visit their website and also read Tomas Lin’s article in the New York Times “Cracking Open the Scientific Process” published on January 16, 2012.

 
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Open access might not be the real issue issue for the future of research communication

By
Kelly Thormodson
– November 3, 2011Posted in: Alternative Publishing Models, Economics of Publishing, Journal Pricing, Open Access, Open Data, Peer Review, Uncategorized

Dr. David Rosenthal, engineer and co-creater of LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) recently spoke on the topic of Open Access at the University of British Columbia.

He choseto look at five audiences where OA may have an effect: general public, researchers, libraries, publishers, and software developers.  He discusses his thoughts on peer-review or in his opinion bad peer-reviewing and whether or not open access increases or decreases bad research publishing; the creation of the big deal journal bundling by publishers to fight off the cost decrease due to the transition to Web publishing and lack of library initiative to fight off the big deals; and how the increase of OA data versus OA articles might be more beneficial for researchers.  Essentially, he believes a combination of reducing publication costs, finding new technology driven publishing models, less restrictions on intellectual property and publishing of better quality articles may be the issues that face the future of research and that OA may just be a way to work on those real issues.

The full transcript of this talk can be found on his blog: http://blog.dshr.org/2011/10/what-problems-does-open-access-solve.html.