Joe Merante's Blog

On Saturday, we hosted an event at CfA as part of Mozilla's Webmaker campaign. It originally began as a continuation of the #OAHack that PLoS hosted (see post below) but the dates aligned and we were pleased to bring together the related ideas of the open web, open science and open access into one event. The Presentation John Wilbanks' started our day with a presentation explaining that if government is a platform, science is a wiki . In its current state, it's a terribly inefficient one, however. He shared some statistics on references to traditional versus open-published papers, such as the number and variety of citations resulting.  So why is science such a terribly inefficient wiki and what can we do to improve sharing, reuse, collaboration and ultimately progress? John Wilbanks Presenting First, open content. John noted the NIH's open access policy and how that's changed the playing field for scientists and in many ways for publishers too, although no ...

Yesterday, I attended a mini hackathon at PLoS in San Francisco to discuss strategies and work on tools to encourage the adoption of open access and shared content policies at research universities, publishers and elsewhere. We hope the event will be the first of many and plan to hold a larger, multi-day event in late June. While some focus on open access to scientific research, it's really part of the broader movement toward opening our entire culture, whether viewed through the lens of OER , Creative Commons , open source software or shared open data. Similar issues are back on the table in Congress with the re-introduced Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill that would require that taxpayer-funded research is made available to the public, similar to the NIH Public Access Policy . A competing bill in the House aimed at scrapping the NIH policy (to protect publisher's interests) led to a boycott of academic publisher Elsevier . The Right to Research Coalition i...

This past weekend, a few dozen people gathered in NYC to hack the Farm Bill.  Hackathons are gatherings of developers, designers and policy experts to collaboratively develop solutions to specific problems.  This year's International Open Data Hackathon took place on December 3 with events all over the world focused on topics like transportation, exposing government data and much more . Food+Tech Connect and Gojee organized the NYC event with the goal of engaging people with the farm bill by creating participatory apps, data visualizations and presentations to directly and indirectly affect our understanding of this important piece of legislation, renegotiated roughly every five years.  The bill affects everything from crop subsidization to federal nutritional programs to investment in farmers.  You can read more about the bill here , and find ways to get involved via Slow Food USA here . I participated on one of the teams to build Meatlessly.com,...