Plausible Accuracy

I was moving this weekend, so I’m a bit late to broadcasting the arrival of the Praxis blog carnival.  The posts that I’ve had a chance to read so far are great, and it seems that there will be something interesting to almost everyone in academia (or perhaps even outside of it).

Kudos to Martin and Bora for getting it off the ground, and I look forward to future installments.

While I try to sort out some things going on in meat world (moving, writing, experiments, committee meeting… all the good stuff), Bora has put out calls for submissions to the first edition of Praxis.  He wants to see submissions along these lines:

“let me explain the reasons why I chose to work with advisor X instead of Y” or “how to give a good talk”, or “why publish OA” or “how does an NIH section work?”) and perhaps most importantly how the new technology - mainly the Internet - is changing the world of science.

Seems like a great place to submit any OA-related blog entries you’d like to see wider readership of.

My previous post was really just a signal flare to see if anyone was aware of a pre-established regular blog carnival which focused on Open Science.  The consensus seems to be that no, there is not, and it would be a worthwhile idea to try.

Here are my thoughts on how to organize such a carnival, that I’m tentatively calling “Open Carnival”, but it could really use a more pithy name (hint: put your ideas in the comments):

• Focus on Open Science, including Open Access, Open Notebooks, and Open Data
• Monthly “publication”
  • This allows for a nice amount of good posts to build up, and cuts down on overhead for the host
• Themed
  • The host chooses a theme for the carnival that will be hosted at their blog.  The theme is announced at the publication of the carnival before, to allow people time to prepare their entries
• Rotating host
  • Anyone interested in hosting could add their name to a list; the carnival migrates through the list
• Content supply: automatic and manual
  • Automatic content retrieval via tag.  For instance the author could apply a tag “Open Carnival” on a post and the host could retrieve these using a tool like Google Blog search
  • Manual method in which the author emails a link to the upcoming host

Sound reasonable?  Anything I left out or should take away?  I’ve already got some ideas for themes to get things started…