Author Archives: pm286

Today 2014-06-01 is a very important date. The UK government has pushed for reform of copyright and – despite significant opposition and lobbying from mainstream publishers – the proposals are now law. Today. Laws are complicated and the language can … Continue reading →

Twice a year the Shuttleworth Fellowship meets in a Gathering – could be anywhere in the world (subject to a minimum travel costs algorithm). This is my first and we are in Budapest – one of Europe’s loveliest cities. (I’ve … Continue reading →

Early last week the UK House of Lords passed the final stages of a Statutory Instrument with exceptions to copyright. For me that most important was that those with legitimate access to electronic content can now use mining technology to … Continue reading →

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Jean-Claude Bradley who invented the concept of “Open NoteBook Science”.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_notebook_science ). [Blue Obelisk presented to J-C (left) by Egon Willighagen (right), 2007. Photo Credit CC BY Christoph Steinbeck] I … Continue reading →

TheContentMine is a project to extract all facts from the scientific literature. It has now been going for about 6 weeks – this is a soft-launch. We continue to develop it and record our progress publicly. It’s a community project and we are … Continue reading →

I am gutted that I missed the Q+A session with Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz the Vice-chancellor of  Cambridge University. It doesn’t seem to have been advertised widely – only 17 people went – and it deserves to be repeated. The indefatigable Richard … Continue reading →

I’m now finishing the second month of my Shuttleworth Fellowship – the most important thing in my whole career. My project The Content Mine aims to liberate all the facts in the scientific literature. That’s incredibly ambitious and I don’t know … Continue reading →

An amazing post came out yesterday from an amazing person. Tim Gowers is a Fields Medallist (the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize).  But Tim is also a star in the world of Open. 5 years ago he launched the … Continue reading →

Some years ago Elsevier funded the PRISM initiative to discredit Open Access with the slogan “Open Access is Junk Science”. The implication, of course, was that of course Elsevier didn’t publish junk. The chemical blogosphere was alerted by Egon Willighagen … Continue reading →

We are now about 6 weeks into The Content Mine project and have now released our website (http://www.contentmine.org). In the spirit of living a web-friendly life this is a living object which is planned to be: easy to update and … Continue reading →