Author Archives: pm286

Thank you President Bush

Posted on December 26, 2007 by pm286

From Peter Suber: OA mandate at NIH now law This morning President Bush signed the omnibus spending bill requiring the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to mandate OA for NIH-funded research.   Here’s the language that just became law: The … Continue reading →

Posted in open issues | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Update on Open crystallography

Posted on December 22, 2007 by pm286

There’s now a growing movement to publishing crystallography directly into the Open. Several threads include: The Crystallography Open Database which pioneered the idea of collecting crystallographic data and making them Openly available. Nick Day’s CrystalEye – aggregation of published Open … Continue reading →

Posted in data, open issues, programming for scientists | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

FoX marches on

Posted on December 22, 2007 by pm286

  Toby White joined us – Jim Downing, Peter Corbett and me – in the pub yesterday to unwind and explore the challenges of tomorrow’s information. Toby has been one of the pillars of supporting CML – there was no … Continue reading →

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Mystery picture

Posted on December 21, 2007 by pm286

What’s this picture? and why might I be interested in it? (It’s not the whole picture, so I claim fair use – I don’t know who the copyright holder is. And the clipped space hides a fairly vital clue). [UPDATE: … Continue reading →

Posted in fun | Tagged , | 3 Comments

the end of the beginning

Posted on December 21, 2007 by pm286

I got a series of euphoric messages from fellow OA activists rejoicing at the news that Preseident Bush was “certain” to sign the House appropriations bill. I searched for the message in Peter Suber’s blog and found … Congress sends … Continue reading →

Posted in open issues | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Java: labelled break considered harmful

Posted on December 20, 2007 by pm286

Readers of my last post may have thought that Eclipse makes refactoring easy. It does – up to a point. I had started to refactor an 800-line module with deeply nested loops – just a matter of extracting the inner … Continue reading →

Posted in programming for scientists | 1 Comment

Refactoring large modules using Eclipse

Posted on December 20, 2007 by pm286

I have recently had to consider refactoring a piece of Java which had got slightly out of hand – the module was 800 lines long and the if statements so deeply nested that they ran well off the right-hand edge … Continue reading →

Posted in programming for scientists | Tagged | 5 Comments

Mystery Picture

Posted on December 20, 2007 by pm286

Here is a photograph (untouched, not CGI). When I saw it I went wow! (I knew what it was). I’d be interested to know if anyone (a) KNOWS what it is of (b) can estimate the scale (c) has seen … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, semanticWeb | 7 Comments

Open Data: publishers are the problem

Posted on December 18, 2007 by pm286

The Chemspider site and blog have been making rapid and valuable progress towards Open Data. This is particularly laudable for a commercial site where Openness in chemistry is a long way from being a proven business model and is actively … Continue reading →

Posted in chemistry, open issues | 3 Comments

Open Notebook Science and Glueware

Posted on December 18, 2007 by pm286

Cameron laments the difficulty of creating an Open Notebook system when there is a lot of data:   The problem with data… Our laboratory blog system has been doing a reasonable job of handling protocols and simple pieces of analysis … Continue reading →

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