My current workflow

I doubt many will be interested in this post, but it is worth recording what I do these days. It differs a lot from how I worked 10 years ago.

My daily routine: read blogs (using subscriptions through Google Reader), check chess news at Chesscafe), check open access news at Open Access Tracking Project and math publishing discussions at Math 2.0. Check and process email (trying to keep to the philosophy of Inbox Zero, and use OmniFocus to see what I have to do, so I can Get Things Done.

Of course I use LaTeX for writing papers, but I have given up bibtex in favour of the biblatex package. I use the beamer package for producing slides for talks. I looked at some papers from 15 years ago and found they no longer compile, and I seem to have lost some macro files. I intend to (sometime) upgrade all of them to my new “house style”, which uses the fourier font package, hyperref, and other packages.

The blogs by mathematical/CS people that I currently read consistently are those by Tim Gowers (Gowers’ Weblog), Scott Aaronson (Shtetl-Optimized), Gasarch/Fortnow (Computational Complexity), Michael Mitzenmacher (My Biased Coin), Noam Nisan et al. (Algorithmic Game Theory), Daniel Lemire, Peter Cameron. I also follow the UoA statistics (Stats Chat) and computer science departmental blogs, and a few other low-traffic ones. It is probably time to revisit this list. I find that commenting on blogs is annoying – the comments come at too fast a pace, people stop reading the discussion within a few days, and the comments are scattered all over the internet.

NZAU Open Research conference

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.

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.

 

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.