About ortholog

Ortholog is pretty sciencey. I'm preferentially interested in scientific research that has been released to the public (but I won't ignore good stuff that isn't free, of course). I'm accumulating things I've found and what I think about them here and you are welcome to look around, with the usual provisos (caveat lector, for example). Naturally the content is affected by my own training, predilictions, ignorances, prejudices and specialities…but so what exactly?!

This is not a blog

No, it isn't. This is a commonplace, a collection of things which once or always piqued or peaked my interest. Consequently, I am happy to adhere slavishly or ignore flagrantly the etiquette of blogs as I see fit. Examples of blog ethical codes:

• Rebecca Blood's six standards of weblogs
• Allen Jenkins's Code Of Blogging Ethics
• cyberjournalist.net Blogger Code Of Ethics
• et cetera

Actually I agree with almost all the principles and with the intent of such codes but I'm just not willing to acquiesce to "Never edit your posts"; pages will change hereabouts, though I'll try to remember to change the posting date so updated versions enjoy a brief spell on the homepage.

Of course, this site is run using blog software (see the colophon and the changelogs). But, while the mainpage updates dynamically with new content and presents the most recent content first, the chronology of site additions is irrelevant on ortholog. There is no date archive and the site is arranged by category (depicted in the phylomemetic dendrogram on index pages).

Open access to science

Free access to research results is increasingly available thanks to the efforts of a number of advocacy groups and a few far-sighted publishers. This is fair and right: directly or otherwise, the public pays for all research and also lives with the consequences. A lot of the Deserving Memes I'm collecting are from the Open Access scientific literature.

Peter Suber (see below) has produced a one-page summary of what Open Access is and Theologis and Davis gave a good summary of the benefits to science of all sorts of data sharing in Plant Physiology 135: 4-9(doi: 10.1104/pp.104.043083).

There is a longer introduction to the concept of Open Access available from Peter Suber (who also maintains a high-traffic Open Access News blog. There's also a monthly publication called Open Access Now.

Briefly, Open Access is about making information free but with copyrights intact. This is most appropriate for scientific information but there are many who have pretty good reasons to object to the idea. It's easy to see how journal publishers add value and why they would want to ensure their business model survives any change in the way that scientists and the public receive information about science developments; it's also easy to see why scientists and the public, who perform and pay for the work, don't necessarily want to spend large sums of money doing so.

However, it takes more than public access to produce public understanding. And working scientists can easily focus on the rich detail of their individual field, missing out on the interesting or innovative, the provocative or the peculiar, the dubious and the dangerous--the kind of stuff gets published and overlooked every single day.