Is a new wave of open access in science building in Europe? My annual roundup of developments in open access, including my own analysis of the extent of free-to-read literature in the biomedical literature database, PubMed. At Absolutely Maybe, Open Access 2016: A Year of Price Bargaining, Preprints, and a Pirate.
You can see where all my "spare" time went in February, in the post Black History Month: The Complicated Power of More Women Scientists' Faces. As well as adding photos, started 5 new Wikipedia pages for African-American women scientists: Angie Turner King, Jane Hinton, Cheryl L. Shavers, Jesse Jarue Mark, and Jessie Isabelle Price.
And a comment I made at PubMed Commons rounds up some resources on updating systematic reviews.
First off at Absolutely Maybe, continuing the discussion about scientific controversies and how opinion shifts: When Science Polarizes: A Personal Activist Story with Evidence.
On the weekend of the anniversary of George Orwell's death, political doublespeak put his final masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the news again. Here's the personal and social context of his struggle to stay alive while writing it: Down and Almost Out in Scotland: George Orwell, 1948, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And 1933 redux. The incredible A.V. Hill's thoughts on internationalism in science and the freedom of scientists to travel and work, and the rise of dangerous forms of nationalism. "The Same Folly, the Same Fury": A.V. Hill in 1933.
In case you missed one, these were my 5 most-visited posts in 2016:
Still shocked that research participants so often aren't informed of study results! Silence: Everyday Betrayals of Research Participants (Absolutely Maybe)
I participated in a roundtable Q&A on preprints in biomedicine with John Ioannidis and others at Clinical Chemistry (PDF).
Posted at Absolutely Maybe, Reproducibility Crisis Timeline: Milestones in Tackling Reproducibility.
I dug into the evidence on the trend for oocyte preservation in my first post for the month at PLOS: Fertility Hedge Fund? Pros and Cons of Egg Banking.
Then I tackled implications of the word of the year. Post-Truth Antidote: Our Roles in Virtuous Spirals of Trust in Science.
My recent talk to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) is now online here - I also have the slides here. And my talk at Research Reproducibility 2016 in Utah is here (apparently starts at 2716).
An update to an old Statistically Funny post about inappropriate data pooling in meta-analysis.
And belatedly caught up with a day-job-related piece in the last ever issue of Cochrane Methods [PDF] - on page 27: PubMed review methods filter and methods research support from PubMed Health.
In Open Access Week, I wrote this at Absolutely Maybe: Between Science's Secretive, Elitist Past and Open, Accessible Future. And I participated in PLOS' reddit science Ask Us Anything about open access.
Science is often a family story. This one is about the wonderful Andrew Herxheimer, and being an academic refugee. What Lies Beneath a Scientist's Life: A Father and Son Story.
And another public service announcement: