Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the paradigm-shifting new journal, PeerJ.

PeerJ is the next evolution of the journal. It’s open access, but instead of charging the authors an arm and a leg, it’s relatively cheap to publish

In my first post here at Information Culture, I made the argument that in order for science to progress, the results of scientific studies must be shared with others. One of the challenges facing scientists in the modern world is that this research is typically published in journals that individuals and libraries must pay to [...]

This post is in honor of Aaron Swartz. I had long considered posting my book as open access but had hesitated in doing so, even though I have long been an enthusiast about OLPC and Creative Commons.  Aaron’s tragic death prompted my urgent reconsideration and offering.   For me, it is the pictures of Aaron, [...]

BOSTON—Rarer than hen’s teeth is a bill in Congress that has bipartisan support. But such legislation exists, and if passed would open up a semi-secret world. The law—the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act—would ensure that research articles based on taxpayer-supported projects are freely available online for the public to read. FASTR [...]

Readers of this blog may have noticed that I’m obsessed with a recently discovered member of the human family tree: the nearly two million-year-old Australopithecus sediba, discovered at a site called Malapa near Johannesburg.  There are several reasons for this fixation. For one thing it’s new—it isn’t every day that a previously unknown human relative [...]

In a hotel ballroom in Portland, Or., this past April, the tables were laid not with silverware and china, but replicas of some of the most important human fossils in the world. Seasoned paleoanthropologists and graduate students alike milled among them, pausing to examine a cutmarked Neandertal skull from Croatia, the bizarre foot bones of [...]

This is an opinion piece I wrote for a new planned journal on open computational research that for one reason or another failed to take off. Hopefully the journal will be resurrected or another will take its place since this is an important topic. Simulation and modeling have now become robust and frequent paradigms in [...]

There’s a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that should make the scientific community sit up and do a little pondering. Researchers from the University of Washington, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the firm MediCC! analyze retracted papers from 1977 onwards and investigate the reasons for their retractions. The [...]

I have been blogging about chemistry and related topics since 2004. Since then I have had the chance to witness the rise of the chemistry blogosphere. What started as a small, loose collection of opinionated men and women has turned into a group of serious and well-informed bloggers who blog with authority and nuance. Partly [...]