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Many interesting charts and data of the global internet use, access, and contributions

Atlas, publications, charts and tables of global information and internet geographies and impacts on information access, information production and information distribution, done over a four year period by Oxford Information Institute. Findings, data, and publication will be published in Open Access formats and platforms. The website is simple but contains lots of information relevant to the topics in Stanford. There are links to external related publications about information geography, access, distribution and production. Very good website. Some limitations include: bias from the two developers and producers as well as institution itself, unknown (not identified) contributors and sponsors.

A very valuable collection demonstrating how economic, political, cultural and linguistic ties impact the flow of knowledge is and information. Of course, such charts do little to explain, why this happens and where a more even distribution of knowledge is desirable. Also, the data that lies behind the visualisations is not always open. Especially vauable are the links to the data collections that are accessible.

This article sets the scene for the special issue on research data and publishing. Research data - that material commonly accepted by the scholarly community as required evidence for hypotheses and insights, for verification and/or reproducibility of experiments - has become an increasingly critical issue for publishers given recent developments in funders' mandates, technological advances, policymakers' interests, and so forth. This is from a special issue of Learned Publishing, vol 27, September 2014. This special issue is open access.

I love the idea that progress and science being based on communication. Often the idea that I have in my mind is a scientist working alone, and that is never truly how the great break-throughs come, but rather from building on the science that we have learned about previously. I still have a problem with the Author Pay part of Open Access publishing, and it seems like it is not actually "Open" if you have to pay to play. The Utopic Version is really the way that I think of "Open" publishing even with all the pit falls of finding the Utopia. I like the rebirth by giving the onus to the reader to review, and that is a model that works as seen by Wikipedia, because people are willing to aid progress with out conventional compensation. I understand all of the problems with this, but I love the possibility.

An article published today in PLoS Biology listing recommendations for publishers in making research data more accessible. The recommendations have been assembled with help of the public online and in meetings!