Philosophy

Facilitating better science

Openness in research and teaching

I try to practice scientific research in the open as suggested in Reinventing Discovery and scientific teaching in the open as suggested by Greg Wilson. The idea is that openness enables massive collaboration, and collaboration leads to better tools, materials, and results.

See also: posts tagged with open-science

Scientific software and reproducibility

Software development is a critical part of science and deserves to be treated as such. Virtually all published science depends on numerous software tools. I subscribe to the principles outlined in the Science Code Manifesto and the Reproducible Research Standard.

To ensure the accuracy and reliability of computational scientific results, it is essential that we strive for a standard of reproducibility. To this end, I make all code used in my papers publicly available. Where reasonable, I try to make the code well-documented and easy to use.

See also: posts tagged with reproducible-research

Scientific publishing and journal pricing

I believe that publishing publicly-funded scientific research should not be a profit-motivated activity. Charges for access to scientific publications should be kept to a minimum. I primarily publish my own work in relatively inexpensive but highly respected journals run by non-profit professional societies (SIAM and the AMS). I am a signatory to the Cost of Knowledge (Elsevier Boycott). I do not support gold open access (i.e., author-pay) journals, for reasons outlined here. I place preprints of all my manuscripts on the arXiv when I submit them for publication. Where allowed by the publisher, I put the final version of my published papers on my site, downloadable from my publications page.

See also: