Category: Open Access


  • Structure of the Pandemic

    Note: This piece was published as a Commentary in the journal Structure! You can find it (paywalled) here, but I’m allowed to share the submitted version open access on my blog! Hope you enjoy, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written to date. During global pandemics, the spread of information needs to be faster…

  • Gentlemen and Scholars: How science is for everyone

    When you think of a scientist, it’s probably someone in a white coat working in a laboratory, chemical bottles labeled on shelves, and computers displaying complex graphs and figures. Perhaps you might think of a biologist or a geologist out in the field collecting samples to bring back to a similar lab to analyze. There’s…

  • Not so marginal annotations

    How sharing notes could be best practices in open peer review When I was in middle school, I remember checking out a book from the YA section, opening the cover eager to start reading it to find something truly horrifying: the word “HI” etched onto the title page in bright pink gel ink. The whole…

  • Changing Scholarly Publication Practices: The Open Access Movement

    Online presence and shareability of content are ever-more important in our modern and increasingly digital world, and science and medicine are no exceptions. With published papers still being the standard for disseminating research, journals and publishing companies continue to largely serve as the gatekeepers of scholarly content. Accessibility is a critical component, with journals either…

  • Open in order to: Optimize scientific research process

    To coincide with the OpenCon London satellite event on 21st November, Know-Center, Digital Science and ScienceOpen are excited to team up with Authorea to announce an essay competition for short blog posts on this year’s Open Access Week theme of “Open in order to …”. This theme is an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly research outputs…

  • We have the technology to save peer review – now it is up to our communities to implement it

    This article was written for and published during the beginning of Peer Review Week 2017. Here on the Impact Blog, we’ll be featuring posts covering a variety of perspectives on and issues relating to peer review, and which also consider this year’s theme of “Transparency”. To kick things off, Jon Tennant, Daniel Graziotin and Sarah Kearns consider what can be done…

  • Knowledge Networking in Scientific Practice

    Technology is being incorporated more and more into our daily lives. Social media platforms allow researchers to easily connect with one another and to simply find citations or resources. Artificial intelligence and big data make it relatively easy to obtain the information scientists need to move forward with their project. With the extended push to publish data,…

  • Practical actions for a collaborative culture

    Competition has its worth: it can provide significant motivation to work late in order to generate enough data to have your paper be first rather than a replicate study. The desire to ‘one-up’ a competitor’s lab can lead to researchers designing novel methods to study the system in question. It is not without its drawbacks…

  • “Integrating Genome, Transcriptome and Electronic Health Records for Discovery and Translation.”

    The following blog article was written live at the 2nd Annual Symposium of RNA in Precision Medicine at the University of Michigan through the Center for RNA Biomedicine. Check out MiSciWriter blog for the whole coverage of the symposium and follow the #umichRNA on Twitter.  “Integrating Genome, Transcriptome and Electronic Health Records for Discovery and…

  • Assessing Impact in Open Access and Conventional Journals

    Recently, a lab mate of mine presented a paper at our weekly research meeting. She ended her analysis saying that she was skeptical of the methods and the rigor of the results because it came from the open access journal PLOSOne. This got me thinking and realizing that even though scientists are constantly demanding data…