Heather Piwowar, BHAG for Openness, Research Remix, September 16, 2008.
... I’d like to propose an idea for a [Big Hairy Audacious Goal]. I suggest that we “become the most open department of biomedical informatics.” By that, I mean we embrace open access, open source, open notebook/process science, open teaching... the whole shebang. ...
Admittedly, we will encounter obstacles with IRBs, university legal and IP departments, protective researchers, AMIA establishment, and the like. There are indeed real concerns about trying to do open biomedical research, but I believe that all the issues can be addressed appropriately while striving to be as open as possible, given the real constraints.
To make the idea concrete, here are a few steps which I think would get us a long way down the leadership path:
strongly encourage our researchers to self-archive all of their non-open access papers in a global or institutional repository
strongly encourage our researchers to make their posters and preprints available on Nature Precedings, or similar
provide department funding for publishing in author-pays open access journals
strongly encourage our researchers to publish in open access journals ...
strongly encourage our researchers to make all data (as appropriate given privacy concerns) publicly available when they publish their papers ...
take a leadership role within JAMIA to encourage an author-pays open-access option
take a leadership role within AMIA to ensure that proceedings are available open access ASAP
encourage students and faculty to experiment with Open Notebook Science ...
put our course documents available on the open web
put all of our theses available on the open web ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/18/2008 12:15:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
