The Week in Review is our weekly roundup of what’s new in open science from the past week. If you have news or announcements you’d like passed on to the community, be sure to share on Twitter with @mozillascience and @billdoesphysics, or join our mailing list and get in touch there.
Government & Policy
- Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green Party, introduced an Open Science bill in the House of Commons this week, seeking to require the products of publicly funded research be available to the public by law. The bill comes in response to what May called “a shocking burial of evidence into places where Canadians will never see it [by the current Canadian federal government].”
Talks & Conferences
- Meghana Keshavan wrote an article describing results presented by Deloitte at the recent BIO Conference in Philadelphia; Deloitte found that open & collaborative drug development lead to three times higher success rates by late stage clinical trials.
- Erin McKiernan presented strategies for success in open access in research, at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication.
Blogs & Papers
- Larivière et al published a study providing evidence that over the past 40 years, the 5 largest scientific publishing firms have further consolidated publishing articles in the natural, medical and social sciences as well as the humanities under their purview. The CBC also picked up the story.
- Walter Frick wrote an article describing a data science study that posed a research question to an ensemble of analysis, to explore strategies for avoiding individual bias.
- Ingo Rholfing blogged on the need for negative incentives for data publishing: default retractions for papers that can’t provide their data, and ‘Data Not Available’ warnings printed on or with such papers.
Tools & Services
- The Medicines for Malaria Venture recently noted a curated list of freely available tools for doing computational chemistry, specially selected for their relevance to common needs in not-for-profit activities.