Last month I’ve updated my profile on LinkedIn to include the new job – the president of Open Science Foundation. This is a new organisation, founded by my employer, Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of Polish Academy of Science. The mission is to promote and develop open science (more on that in another post), but I’d like to focus first on a single idea that I hope can change the dynamics of open science environment. Citizen science became much more…
Coming back to blogging
It’s been almost three years since the last post here and so much had changed in between. On the scientific front, I’ve entered biomedical field for good. I’m currently starting new line of projects on the systems dynamics of disease states of human organism. It does sounds cryptic, doesn’t it? Basically I’m working on medical conditions that at some level of abstraction are incarnations of butterfly effect. These are (of course) various cancers, but also sudden infant death syndrome. More on…
Notes after my workshop entitled “Open Science. What is in it for me?”
In celebration of Open Access Week a few days ago I led a workshop entitled “Open Science. What is in for me?”. Workshop was organized by Kaunas University of Technology & The Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers and took a place in the beatiful city of Kaunas. The slides are below: Open Science workshop at Kaunas University of Technology from Pawel Szczesny I’ve started with a brief overview of what Open Science is and how it relates to the way…
What’s after SEO? Memetic engineering?
Search Engine Optimisation had officially entered into academia when publishers started to provide guides to SEO (here’s example of such guide from Wiley). Of course, authors of scholarly literature have used SEO (often under other names) for much longer, although now it’s official and almost recommended. I’m interested in SEO for more than 10 years, often experimenting with various techniques (for example, if you look for CLANS, Java software for clustering of protein sequences, my blog post describing the software…
Open Access means people die
Reader beware, a rant ahead. Believe me, I waited 24 hours to calm down before writing this text. But a day passed and I’m still outraged by recent posts of Peter Murray-Rust entitled “Open Research Reports: What Jenny and I said (and why I am angry)” and “Open Access saves lives“. He made there following assertions: close access publishing restricts access to information no access to information means suboptimal decisions, for example in choosing medical treatment therefore closed access means…
Google’s Panda and the research assessment
Search engine optimization is a fascinating field. I was playing around with the concept, looking for holes in search algorithms or browsers source code a long time ago but I’m trying to catch up with developments a few times a year. Most of Google users haven’t noticed its new algorithm for scoring pages called Panda. It is based on extensive manual assessment of sample websites and quite detailed questionnaire covering such aspects as trust, authority, presence of ads or quality of…