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Open Access means people die

25, Oct 2011

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 [...]

Systems Institute is officially supporting FigShare (backstage story)

2, Mar 2011

You may or may not know that I’m the head of Systems Institute, non-profit research organization founded in 2009 in Poland. The Institute is located in Poland, but is operating internationally. There’s not much you can learn about this initiative, as we haven’t put up a real website yet (although there’s a placeholder). There was [...]

From CC-BY to CC-Zero

14, Jan 2011

I’ve never been satisfied with “attribution” part of Creative Commons licenses and obviously I’m not alone in this camp. The main issue is that while CC terms require attribution in the manner required by author, parties resharing the creative work rarely check these requirements. Frequently authors of images posted to Flickr complain that some high [...]

Open Foo: sharing practice, social movement and technology

4, Aug 2010

In the discussion under my recent post on incompatibilities between open source and open data Bill Anderson pointed out frequent confusion between “open source” and “free software”. He cited Richard Stallman’s essay which argues that open source is a software development methodology, while free software is a social movement. Building on that, Bill wrote that [...]

Open science – campfire, formal knowledge acquisition or both?

1, Jul 2010

Image via Wikipedia Recently I’ve stumbled upon this provocative post by Robert Paterson entitled Are Books Bad For Us?. Of course he doesn’t advocate to burn all books, but rather wonders whether books lower our ability to observe and think for ourselves. What catched my attention was the paragraph below: How did pottery get invented? [...]

Biases, biases everywhere

1, Jul 2010

When I skim through list of cognitive biases , I wonder why papers like Over-optimism in bioinformatics: an illustration (hat tip: Neil) do not appear more often. Here’s the abstract: MOTIVATION: In statistical bioinformatics research, different optimization mechanisms potentially lead to “over-optimism” in published papers. So far, however, a systematic critical study concerning the various [...]

Minor site problems

11, May 2010

I’ve had a number of technical issues with this site, but all seem to be solved right now (errors with WordPress consuming more memory than allowed size seemed to relate to IntenseDebate plugin – now deactivated). As I was cleaning, I’d also removed RSS feeds of Twitter and FriendFeed from sidebar – first one regularly [...]

My ignite talk over at Science Online 2010

8, Feb 2010

Image via Wikipedia This more or less transcript of the ignite talk I gave over at Science Online 2010. The video hasn’t been posted yet, but I will update the post, when it’s available. It’s already a few years since I’ve implemented my Personal Virtual Advisory Board. No, it’s not another name for hanging out [...]

Patent data available. So what?

31, Dec 2009

From O’Reilly Radar post entitled: Unlikely Group Working Happily Together To Solve Patent Problem: In September, the Patent Office announced a rather strange “Request for Information” (RFI). Under this proposed scheme, the Patent Office would receive a substantial (upwards of $10 million!) donation of equipment from a vendor. In return, the vendor would get to [...]

Nanobiotechnology should be mobile

30, Dec 2009

It occured to me that whatever bionanotechnology is going to come to the market in the following years, it must consider mobile devices, especially mobile phones, as its platform. Upcoming technologies are already portable, just to name paper-based microfluidic analytical devices. We just only need to couple them with mobile phones and a computing cloud [...]


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