science

Open-Access Science Growing in Reach

- Adam Clare

Many academic journals charge a subscription fee that is out of reach for the common person, which means that independent researchers and students are at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing information. Elementa aims to make research about the anthropocene era we’re in freely accessible for everyone.

Elementa follows the example of organizations such as PLoS, who offers peer-reviewed research to academics worldwide on an open-access, public-good basis. Elementa aims to facilitate scientific solutions to the challenges presented by this era of accelerated human impact on natural systems. It is committed to the rapid publication of technically sound, peer-reviewed articles that address interactions between human and natural systems and behaviors. Six knowledge domains form the structure of the publication, each headed by an Editor-in-Chief – Atmospheric Science, Earth and Environmental Science, Ecology, Ocean Science, Sustainable Engineering, and Sustainability Sciences.

It’s not just academic journals that are freeing knowledge to make it more available in the USA. The White House has recently stated that research funded by the American government will be freely available:

The White House has moved to make the results of federally funded research available to the public for free within a year, bowing to public pressure for unfettered access to scholarly articles and other materials produced at taxpayers’ expense.

“Americans should have easy access to the results of research they help support,” John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote on the White House website.

Read more about the White House’s open access stance.
Read more about Elementa.

Physicists Open Up

- Adam Clare

Results from publically-funded research often ends up in places that the average person can’t access the findings because scientific (and other) journals where results are printed cost an arm and a leg. Physicists, who are already renowned for being open, have taken the next logical step and said that any research paid for by public funds will be available for all for free!

After six years of negotiation, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is now close to ensuring that nearly all particle-physics articles — about 7,000 publications last year — are made immediately free on journal websites. Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access.
…
Mele says that the goal of SCOAP3 is to switch the discipline’s journals to open access without researchers noticing any effect on their grant funding or on the way they publish papers. The consortium will pay the contracts from an annual budget of €10 million, which is funded not by authors or research grants, but by pledges from more than a thousand libraries, funding agencies and research consortia across the world. In effect, existing journal subscription fees are being repurposed to provide the open-access funds.

Read more at Nature.

Use Your Smartphone to Advance Science

- Adam Clare

Smartphones aren’t just for games and checking your email anymore! Today, these mobile devices can be used to better the world around us by helping scientists understand more about it. Thanks to the distribution of mobiles research can be crowd-sourced to provide information that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Below is one of ten ways that you can use your phone to make the world a little better:

5. Inventory your Local Wildlife
The goal of Project NOAH (Networked Organisms and Habitats) is pretty ambitious: “build the go-to platform for documenting all the world’s organisms.” Their app has two modes. “Spottings” lets you take photos of plants and animals you see, categorize and describe them and then submit the data for viewing on NOAH’s website and use by researchers for population and distribution studies.

Don’t know what you’re looking at? Check a box when you submit your photo and other users and scientists can help you identify the species. You can also use the location-based field guides to see other users’ Spottings near your location and learn more about your local wildlife. “Field Missions” let you help out with crowdsourced data collection for specific studies that labs have submitted to NOAH. You might be asked to photograph invasive beetles near your home, or log GPS coordinates when migrating flocks of birds pass over you, and if discovering wildlife and helping scientists isn’t enough motivation, completing missions also earns you cool badges in the app. Project NOAH is available for free for iOS and Android devices

Read the full text here.

How do We Define Life?

- Adam Clare

Most of the news that gets covered here is related to new discoveries and good events happening around the world, but sometimes we need to take a step back from those discoveries and think deeper about what it all means. Recently NASA launched its most ambitious mission to Mars and they hope to find evidence of life.

But what is life?

Philosophers for hundreds of years have tried to answer this question and depending on who you ask we are closer or no closer than we were when humanity first asked such a question. Some people rely on old writings or established mythos for defining life, but those generally don’t old up when looking for something truly alien to us. Which leads us to something relatively new to the world of science and that is figuring out a sound and comprehensive definition for life for the purposes of scientific research.

Defining life poses a challenge that’s downright philosophical. There’s no ambiguity in looking for water, because we have a clear definition of it. That definition is the same whether you’re on Earth, on Mars, or in intergalactic space. It is the same whether you’re dealing with water as ice, liquid, or vapor. But there is no definition of life that’s universally agreed upon. When Portland State University biologist Radu Popa was working on a book about defining life, he decided to count up all the definitions that scientists have published in books and scientific journals. Some scientists define life as something capable of metabolism. Others make the capacity to evolve the key distinction. Popa gave up counting after about 300 definitions.

Things haven’t gotten much better in the years since Popa published Between Necessity and Probability: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life in 2004. Scientists have unveiled even more definitions, yet none of them have been widely embraced. But now Edward Trifonov, a biologist at the University of Haifa in Israel, has come forward with a new attempt at defining life, based on a new strategy. Rather than add on yet another definition to the pile, he’s investigating the language that previous scientists have used when they talk about life.

Edward Trifonov: Life is self-reproduction with variations.

Trifonov acknowledges that each definition of life is different, but there’s an underlying similarity to all of them. “Common sense suggests that, probably, one could arrive to a consensus, if only the authors, some two centuries apart from one another, could be brought together,” he writes in a recent issue of the Journal of Biomolecular Structures and Dynamics (article PDF).

Read the rest of the article here.

Science is Great!

- Adam Clare

publicscience.ca is designed to educate the Canadian population about how great science and knowledge is. This a direct reaction to the direct attacks that research, science, and innovation have been under since the Conservative government took power. It’s really good to see scientists taking a stand and promoting all the reasons that science and research makes the world a better place!

It can also highlight important work that is already on the public record but may not be getting the attention it deserves. Of course, scientists who work for the Canadian people must be answerable for the dollars they spend. But too often, critiques of government science begin and end with knee-jerk scoffing when the topics seem frivolous to the ill-informed layman. A study on bird habitats, for example, might teach us something important about the environmental impact of public policy.

Ottawa is a government town. Part of what that means — although Ottawans themselves are prone to forget this — is that it’s a research town. Citizens have a duty to be informed about the world around them. Government has a duty to, at the very least, not get in their way.

Read more

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