#rds2013 0. “Managing research data” at Columbia NY. I am not constrained in what I say.

I’m setting out what I want to present at Columbia #rds2013 in a series of posts. I’ve got 15 mins to present- this is good discipline and it means I have to work very hard to prepare – I can’t do a stream-of-consciousness/conscience. So I’m preparing ca 10-15 titles. This post is not a title but sets out the basics.

When I was invited to present – by Kathryn Pope – I jumped at the chance. This is clearly a high-profile meeting and comes at a very good time in my thoughts and actions. So I said yes.

But then it became clear that I would be sponsored by Elsevier (who are co-sponsors of the meeting). I have taken a public stance against Elsevier’s practices (along with many thousands of others) and refuse to referee, publish or act as editor for Elsevier publications. I have additional reasons from Tim Gowers:

• Elsevier have actively built walled gardens around science (Sciverse, Scopus] and act as kingmakers, controlling scientific information practice and hence thought.
• Elsevier have systematically dragged their heels on content-mining. Others have had similar experiences. They intend to create licences, unilaterally, without which their material cannot be mined.
• They set ultra-restrictive clauses on what universities and their staff can do with subscription content. No indexing, no crawling.
• They have wasted my time over 3 years with fobbed off promises. I have documented these and reported to the Hargreaves process.

Accepting sponsorship from Elsevier would therefore be double standards, so I declined the invitation. However Kathryn offered to pay independently of Elsevier so I have accepted with many thanks. This gives me the freedom to say what I feel rather than feel constrained by being sponsored by an organization of which I disapproved.

To do justice to this topic will require hours, not minutes. I shall therefore post my titles and then annotate each with a blogpost (I hope to finish before the meeting). I’ll then create approx. 15 slides with detailed internal timed transitions so that the whole will run automatically and last exactly 900 seconds (similar to a pechaKucha or Ignite). The next slide should be the titles…