Tidbits, 22 December 2009

Every time I do a tidbits post, I think to myself, "gosh, that was a lot of tidbits; I'll never fill up the queue again."

Every time, I'm wrong.

• The climate-data scandal staggers on: Gavin Baker has another great summary post, from which I particularly appreciated the Climategate article. We also have a climate skeptic who won't show his work. For a list of freely-available sources of climate data, see RealClimate or the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.
• High-profile flu data leads to bizarrely childish behavior. One hopes that data-sharing norms will eventually put a stop to resource-wasting nonsense like this.
• A typically breezy report on the data deluge from Wired. I winced at the headline too, but the article's not bad.
• Insight into digital preservation of research output in Europe (PDF). Skim the Key Findings, helpfully placed at the beginning, if you do nothing else. I was impressed by the organizational pragmatism of the publishers surveyed.
• The Association for Research Libraries recently did a survey of its members about their e-science efforts. One result is this handy and helpful list of planning and program documents. Environmental scan in a box! (Disclaimer: I answered the survey on behalf of MPOW in consultation with others, and a couple of documents from MPOW are listed on this ARL page.)
• BMJ asks for more transparency about drug data (ironically, in a non-open-access editorial).
• Au secours! More existing datasets losing funding, such that their continued existence is in doubt. We need an academic Archive Team (warning: language may be NSFW) desperately.
• Jennifer Rohn asks for lab heads to heed the welfare of their students and postdocs with regard to data sharing. Usefully sobering for open-data and open-notebook-science advocates.
• The New York Times fetes Jim Gray, Microsoft e-science guru. This is a good article for those new to the whole idea of data-driven science or data curation.
• Fellow SciBling John Wilbanks is one of my favorite speakers. See him on a panel at Columbia about open data.

Happy holidays to those celebrating them.

Want to help me collect tidbits? Tag them "trogool" on del.icio.us, or leave a comment in a tidbits post. Like, er, this one.