Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing
Claire Redhead, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, December 19, 2013

A number of organizations have come together to draft these principles (The Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors) and while I'm not sure I would consider them definitive, they would definitely carry some weight, within a certain context. The principles include a requirement for peer review, governing body, editorial team, clear policies about fees and access, accurate statement of ownership, and openness about business models, conflict of interest, and avertising policies. I'm goods that they don't define what peer review should look like (this allowing, for example, post-publication peer review) but less sanguine about process elements requiring a committee and reviewers from outside the editorial board - it effectively makes a small (or one-person) operation questionable, and I'm not sure that should follow automatically. Still, good overall principles. Note that it's a work in progress and they're still looking for feedback.

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Get Your Mood On: Part 1
Alexandra Carmichael, Robin Barooah, Quantified Self, December 19, 2013

The idea of the quantified self is to measure certain aspects of your life and reflect on them, in order to set goals and live a fuller life. It is not for everyone, obviously, and different people are interested in measuring different things. One common think to measure is health and fitness; for example, I use an application called Runkeeper, which tells me I cycled more than 1600 km (1000 miles) last year. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have reached that goal without tracking it.

So the current series of posts is about measuring emotions. The objective, write the authors, is not simply to achieve happiness. That "would seem to be almost disrespectful to the wide range of possible human emotions that lift us up, teach us, and make life rich and varied." Rather, the idea is that "paying attention to how you feel, using all the tools available in our modern world, can help you grow as a human being and ultimately make more sense of your life." Makes sense to me. The series has six parts. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: How Is Mood Measured? Part 3: Preparing Your Mental State Part 4: DIY Mood Tracking  Part 5: Mood Sharing and Experimentation Part 6: Exploring the Future of Mood Tracking).

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QuickWire: Elsevier Joins University College London in Big-Data Project
Lawrence Biemiller, The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog, December 18, 2013

According to this report, "The publishing giant Elsevier and University College London said on Wednesday morning that they were joining to create a Big Data Institute 'to explore innovative ways to apply new technologies and analytics to scholarly content and data.'" So a question for open data advocated - how do you want to license open data, given this? Open allowing commercial use? Then Elsevier can use its data and your data to do comprehensive analytics, which it charges more for, while it denies access to open data analytics providers, who can use only open data sources for their analytics. Or do you use a non-commercial license, and level the playing field?

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