My first visit to Oslo was in 2006. That time, it was for work and we were some distance away from town. I remember the flight in gave a dramatic impression, and I remember sitting in the conference centre, looking over the hill side, breathing in the thick scent of pine watching the sun slowing crawl toward the horizon at about 11pm. I only got into town the once, on the last night, and saw little of it which I was disappointed about. My second visit to Norway was to Trondheim and I enjoyed that as well.

Although in some disciplines, it is relatively uncontentious, the rise of open access publishing has produced a lot of comment in others. In one of my two disciplines, computing science, this form of publication is still the minority, and still raises comment. For instance, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon has commented suggesting this scientists are highly naive about the costs of publishing. He argues that scientific publishing is intrinsically expensive, and that open access will have negative implication for science as a whole.

Josh Brown from JISC has given his permission for me to reproduce the feedback from the peer-reivew of my last JISC grant which bounced. A shame, as it would have provided us with an opportunity to test out knowledgeblog on papers from the wild, while also producing an great demonstrator of the advantages of using the web to distribute papers with web technology rather than just dumping a link to a PDF.

So, to start with a rant.

In a typically thoughtful post, Peter Sefton discusses the advantages and disadvantages of Wordpress as an authoring environment. I though I would clarify my feelings on this a little.