Resources for open-source and alternative science ventures

arXiv.org
Open access to 1,329,580 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics

A pirating service for academic journal articles could bring down the whole establishment
But regardless of where Harvard researchers have published their work since then, it’s likely that all of it is currently available for free on Sci-Hub, a rogue pirating service for academic research. According to a new study, Sci-Hub contains 68.9% of all academic research. More to the point: 85.2% of all papers originally published behind paywalls are available on the website for free. And even if a given article isn’t already available in Sci-Hub’s repository, the site can quickly fetch it using donated credentials for services like JSTOR, Elsevier, and Sage.

​http://beta.ourmedian.com/@openscience
Ourmedian is building a collective space for individuals, libraries and organisations to share public content to be discovered by others.

Zapatistas Reimagine Science as Tool of Resistance
by Sophie Duncan
“With all of the damage that the capitalists have done to the people through their misuse of science, scientifically can you create a science that is truly human in order to avoid falling into a science that is inhuman, and if it is possible create a truly human science, who can create it?....Science that ignores these questions is not apolitical; it is oppressive"

Examples of why science is not immune to systems of oppression

Dear Academics: A Lot (All) of This Is TerribleChanda Prescod-WeinsteinFollow
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: fighting scientists with science 
my thoughts: Science folk worried about the new impending doom on academia and scientific inquiry -- Welcome👏🏾To👏🏾the👏🏾show. 
People of color been dealing with this and been surviving so why not listen up and support us folks who tryin to shake it up. I ain't see non of y'all ever sharing my posts. Follow my 4Love+Science page to why don't ya! It's about to get next level.

UNNATURAL SELECTION
HOW RACISM WARPS SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS by Abaki Beck
"When we talk of science today, we often discuss peer-reviewed research conducted by university professors or scientists at huge national agencies. There is an assumption that scientific truths are not only strongly supported by evidence, but also largely unbiased, nonpartisan, and universal. As with all aspects of Western society, however, science is deeply tainted with the legacies of colonialism and racism. Despite its contributions, Western science has viciously exploited marginalized communities through forced experimentation and worked to discredit non-Western scientific thought. Its truth comes with an asterisk."
​
To Decolonise Maths, Stand up to Its False History and Bad Philosophy
BY CHANDRA KANT RAJU ON 26/10/2016
"A false history of science was used to initiate colonial education, in support of colonialism. This false history persists. In a recent article about decolonising mathematics, for instance, Professor Karen Brodie asserts that “Much, though certainly not all, of mathematics was created by dead white men”.This is not true."


Diversity in Science: Why It Is Essential for Excellence
​Science and technology are society's main engines of prosperity. Who gets to drive them?
By Fred Guterl on October 1, 2014
"For diversity to be effective, the working environment must be right. For an individual, it takes conscious effort to be on the watch for unconscious biases and to overcome them. For an organization, it takes processes, procedures and an ethos of acceptance. Victoria Plaut points out, beginning on page 52, that groups who abandon color-blind policies and embrace the differences among their members in ways that do not stereotype or pigeonhole tend to be successful in taking advantage of what diversity has to offer.
...
Scientists pride themselves on their objectivity, but personal experience and point of view have a lot to do with what questions get asked in the first place and how researchers go about answering them. The people in science and engineering are driving the world's most vital engine of prosperity and new ideas. Who are they?"


From the March for Science to an Abolitionist Science​
Britt Rusert is Assistant Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017).
"Just as prison abolitionists demand a world without prisons while valuing the forms of thought, writing, and activism produced by prisoners themselves, an abolitionist science might attend to how science, medicine and technology contribute to structures of inequality and systemic violence while using the tools of science to inspire new forms of political imagination and transformation."


Science Must Clean Up Its Act
Our community still struggles with diversity, equity and inclusion issues, including systemic bias, harassment, discrimination and more
​By Heather Metcalf on May 22, 2017
"If there’s one thing the scientific community values most, it’s objectivity. Objectivity amounts to a scientist’s ability to conduct work that is not skewed by personal, political, financial, emotional, social, and/or other biases or opinions. Often, scientists try so hard to become objective that they come to believe that they have no biases.
However, all people, even scientists, have biases. Disregarding our biases or believing that we have none, only means that we are more likely to act on them. "

Women miss out on authorship opportunities early onBy Maggie Kuo
​"The looming question is why there’s a publication gap that goes opposite to what one might expect based on the hours worked. Lack of confidence among female students, which is commonly cited as a factor contributing to the underrepresentation of women in science, did not appear to play a role for the female students at the 53 institutions involved in the study. The source may lie in the lab dynamics, Feldon suggests: The interactions in the labs among graduate students and between faculty members and graduate students may favor men to get better yields for their time spent."

Women ask fewer questions than men at conference talks, new studies suggest
By Maggie KuoOct. 23, 2017 , 12:15 PM
“We have this assumption that, ‘Oh, if we can just get the number of men and women in a room to be the same, then magically all behavioral differences will disappear,’” says study author Emily Glassberg, a biology graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “But this just speaks to the fact that there's something more complex going on.”

Scientists Think They're More Rational Than Other People
Researchers may have an overconfident view of their profession's objectivity
By Simon Makin on May 1, 2017
​"Veldkamp hopes that awareness of the findings may help scientists acknowledge their biases and fallibility. Scientists' overconfidence in their profession's intellectual rigor could, for instance, make them more resistant to efforts to improve the reproducibility of research. "

The Age of the Algorithm"Computer algorithms now shape our world in profound and mostly invisible ways. They predict if we’ll be valuable customers and whether we’re likely to repay a loan. They filter what we see on social media, sort through resumes, and evaluate job performance. They inform prison sentences and monitor our health. Most of these algorithms have been created with good intentions. The goal is to replace subjective judgments with objective measurements. But it doesn’t always work out like that."

"Narratives" in science communication [revised] [revised again] [three times]

Creating this space to accumulate resource on the science of sex and gender.  Feel free to add in the comments



https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-science-of-sex-and-gender/
"Sex is supposed to be simple—at least at the molecular level. The biological explanations that appear in textbooks amount to X + X = and X + Y = . Venus or Mars, pink or blue. As science looks more closely, however, it becomes increasingly clear that a pair of chromosomes do not always suffice to distinguish girl/boy—either from the standpoint of sex (biological traits) or of gender (social identity)....

To varying extents, many of us are biological hybrids on a male-female continuum. Researchers have found XY cells in a 94-year-old woman, and surgeons discovered a womb in a 70-year-old man, a father of four. New evidence suggests that the brain consists of a “mosaic” of cell types, some more yin, others further along the yang scale."

https://issuu.com/jkharij/docs/decolonizing_gender_zine_v2.compres
"Decolonizing Gender: A Curriculum  Published on Jan 19, 2017  
a free zine created by Malcolm Shanks and khari jackson for our "decolonizing gender: a curriculum" workshop. we created this zine so that anyone who's interested can have the tools and resources they need to facilitate their own workshop on decolonizing gender whenever and wherever they wanted to! yay for accessible knowledge for all! there are also excerpts from khari's free comic book "my gender is My Gender". full free pdf as well as information on how to purchase copies and/or donate can be found at jkharij.com/mgmg"



https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
"On April 22, 2005, Harvard University's Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative (MBB) held a defining debate on the public discussion that began on January 16th with the public comments by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, on sex differences between men and women and how they may relate to the careers of women in science. The debate at MBB, "The Gender of Gender and Science" was "on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes"."