I attended most of all 3 days of the conference. The technology was surprising to me – collaborative online notepads were written on by attendees, and tweets were sent from one room to the other to find out what people were doing. The amount of activity on Twitter was enough that the hashtag #aunzor was hijacked by some unsavoury spammers. Notable speakers were Aidan Byrne, CEO of Australian Research Council (via Google Hangout), and Nat Torkington. Mat Todd from Sydney gave a very interesting talk about open lab book science. I am still thinking how open research methods would apply in mathematics. The overall standard of discussion was high, and in the end resulted in a declaration (soon to be finished) in support of open research. Overall a very well organized and inspiring meeting – congratulations to the organizers. This was my first ever panel appearance at a conference.
Author Archives: wilson.mark.c
Open access in 2013
There has been much news already this year, some of it disturbing. The Andrew Auernheimer case and the Aaron Swartz case (which ended tragically) show that there can be serious consequences to encouraging openness. Luckily, the scholarly community can fix the current problems with access itself, given enough will. Governments seem to be realizing how important the issue is, and the Australian Research Council is the latest funder to enact an OA mandate (albeit a flawed one). It will be interesting to see how long it takes New Zealand to follow suit.
I have been invited to participate in the Open Research conference in Auckland, 6-7 February and am looking forward to it. It’s hard to quantify, but I have a strong feeling that 2013 is the year in which open access is finally regarded as a problem that is essentially solved. We can then turn our attention to the more serious problem of filtering the huge amount of free information: “traditional” peer review is not working well, and this problem will persist independent of access. A radical rethinking of careerism and a reconnection with the true spirit of scholarship is needed: the demand side of publishing must be addressed.
New on arXiv.org is an excellent article by Bjoern Brembs and Marcus Munafo – Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank.
Research happenings
Publications
I have updated my local archive to reflect some new publications:
- Simulator for the 2011 NZ Referendum (with Geoffrey Pritchard), Parliamentary Affairs, to appear.
- Best Reply Dynamics for Scoring Rules (with Reyhaneh Reyhani), Proceedings of ECAI 2012.
- Coordination via Polling in Plurality Voting Games under Inertia(with Reyhaneh Reyhani and Javad Khazaei), Proceedings of COMSOC 2012.
- Asymptotics of coefficients of multivariate generating functions: improvements for multiple points. Online Journal of Analytic Combinatorics 2012.
- Power measures derived from the sequential query process (with Geoffrey Pritchard and Reyhaneh Reyhani), Mathematical Social Sciences, to appear.
- Random Cayley digraphs of diameter 2 and given degree (with Manuel Lladser, Primoz Potocnik and Jozef Siran), Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science 2012.
A few more open access items
Analytic Combinatorics in Several Variables
Robin Pemantle and I have written a book summarizing over a decade of research. The first draft sent to the publisher is available from the book website. We expect publication in 2013 and welcome feedback on this draft version.
Quality of open access outlets
The “gold OA” (pay-to-publish) model of scientific publishing has an obvious downside – in a market driven by producers, not consumers, some pretty low quality stuff can be produced. There are many organizations that seemingly exist only to part foolish authors from their money, with very low quality control and a variety of unscrupulous practices. They often solicit submissions by email. For authors, it is essential to consult Beall’s list of predatory open access publishers (and his list of criteria for inclusion in this list) before getting involved with any such outlet.
Reinventing Discovery
I highly recommend the book (published in 2011, but I have only just read it – it’s hard to be on the cutting edge) Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen. He “wrote this book with the goal of lighting an almighty fire under the scientific community”. His overview of Open Science, of which Open Access to publications is just one component, is very compelling and optimistic, without losing sight of difficulties.
PhD comics video about Open Access
Thanks to Zoran Skoda, here is the link.
Open Access Week
This week I went to a talk by Alex Holcombe who is active in the open access movement (if it can be so characterized) and a co-creator of the great Scientist Meets Publisher video which must be seen, even if you have seen it before. It seems there is a small but active community of OA advocates here at UoA which I hope to join.
Submission to the Electoral Commission Review of MMP
I missed the first deadline for proposals for submissions to the review, but now that the Proposals Paper has been released, it has focused attention on a smaller number of issues. With Michael Fowlie (current COMPSCI 380 project student) I have made a submission based on simulations of what we hope are “realistic” elections. We find that the party vote threshold should be lower than the 4% recommended by the commission. I have been told by the EC that our submission will be an appendix to their report due out on 31 October. It will be interesting to see a) their recommendations b) whether they lead to any actual change.
Addendum: our submission appears as Appendix D in the commission’s final report to Parliament. They went with the 4% recommendation in the end.