Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Pushing for more open access

There was an article on the BBC site, uh… several months ago (playing catch-up here) about a renewed push among the scientific community for open access to research results and publications.

The lack of such open access is for me a major pet peeve. The problem is simply this: all of the credibility is currently entrenched in old, slow, and expensive publishing houses. Journals take a while to build up a reputation, and nobody wants to publish in a journal with no reputation. It’s no good for one’s own credibility, and a sure-fire way to shoot oneself in the foot with regards to getting grant money.

Now, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is making a little bit of head-way, but it’s taking a while to bootstrap for the reasons mentioned above.

So, enough complaining.

I have a plan. Unfortunately it’s in the early planning stages. It’s been stewing in my mind for 13 or 14 months, but I’ve finally put together an outline of the plan on paper, and will be running it by progressively larger groups of people, starting tomorrow with my lab. Once I’ve got the rough edges smoothed out a bit, I plan on posting it here. We need to move away from the outdated model that’s currently well-entrenched, and even unnecessarily emulated by PLoS. At the same time, scientific integrity must be maintained. It’s an interesting challenge.

Stupid Word

Dear Microsoft Word,
Please stop trying to outsmart me. I promise you that I really want to select the letters I drag the mouse across, and not the surrounding words.

Thanks,
–Brock

This is one reason why journals should not require submissions in MS Word format. Gar.

Paper’s almost done

I have been working nonstop. Had a very interesting meeting with IBM sales reps yesterday about possible new hardware configurations for the lab. The stuff I’ve been learning in my parallel programming class really came in handy, I was able to grill the sales reps and find out exactly what I needed to know. There may be 6000 or more CPUs in our future…

In other news, I’m trying to get back on the triathlon training bandwidth, and get off of the caffeine. The best I’ve ever felt, and I think maybe my only all-A semester of my undergraduate years both came when I was exercising regularly and off the caffeine. I just need it for one more day, and one more, and one more… although this really has been a bad time to quit, with all of the looming deadlines. I’m going to attempt a swim tomorrow early in the morning followed by a 41-mile bike ride late in the afternoon, after I’ve sent my draft to my advisor. This has been partially driven by the newly-minted Hopkins triathlon club.

I’ve not been inactive, with regard to the blog. Every day new post ideas pop into my head, and in good GTD fashion, they go on my @Blog context list. I plan to start emptying that list soon. Sooon….