Category Archives: Uncategorized

The great things about a good hackathon is that you don’t know what you will be doing until you get together and pool ideas and expertise. Today we have our Open culture and science hack-day. About 20 “streams” ranging from … Continue reading →

Today is when people start arriving en masse for OKFest – the main sessions start tomorrow. I’m hanging out with the organizers, volunteers , etc. The staff and volunteers are doing the last-minute stuff whih is always more than you … Continue reading →

OKFest is about fun, and making things (and a lot more). So here’s examples of our laser cutting badges. Chuff went to Massimo, smiled and asked could he have a name badge. “#OKFEST, CHUFF, OKAPI”. He is now the smartest … Continue reading →

Scientists write articles so people can read them. But now we’ve realised that machines can read them as well. And we have argued /pmr/2012/09/16/our-manifesto-the-right-to-read-is-the-right-to-mine-universities-you-must-fight-for-open-content-mining-before-its-too-late/ that if you subscribe to read an article you also have the right to use machines … Continue reading →

I am at #okfest in Helsinki – 13 (THIRTEEN) separate tracks on Openness. I am already gutted that I shall miss most of them because they are in parallel. I’m helping run Open Research and Education and obviously that will … Continue reading →

Over the last ten years University (Libraries) have signed or resigned one million contracts with scholarly publishers (eg. Elsevier) which forbid re-use of the subscribed material. Thus, for example, if your university rents a scientific journal for 5000 USD a … Continue reading →

It’s a very busy time for #animalgarden – the group of animals committed to Openness. Last month they made the allegorical movie of weak chemical AI (“Magic Chemical Panda”, /pmr/2012/08/17/animalgarden-present-the-chemical-chinese-room-at-the-american-chemical-society-meeting/ and ). Now they’ve been busy on #openbiblio and #okfest. … Continue reading →

Next Tuesday I am giving an invited talk at Oxford on Open Data http://digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk/ , http://digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk/programme , and also involved with a session run by the OKF immediately afterwards. As always I don’t know what I am going to say … Continue reading →

This blog highlights some splendid work done by Ross Mounce, one of our Panton Fellows. Ross actually started this before he applied to us, but he’s done and though a lot since so we can claim a little reflected glory. … Continue reading →

Lee Dirks died yesterday with his wife in a car accident in Peru: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/08/29/2-americans-peruvian-die-in-peru-highway-accident/ Many have already written about Lee today, e.g.: Savas Parastatidis http://savas.me/2012/08/rip-my-friend-lee-dirks/ And John Wilbanks: http://del-fi.org/post/30531593681/remembering-lee-dirks So I’ll try to add something different. I met Lee about … Continue reading →