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The Open Knowledge Festival 2012, Helsinki: some notes

September 26th, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Conferences | Panton Fellowship updates - (0 Comments)

Wow! Where to begin… In this post I shall attempt to summarise some of OKFestival 2012.

Some Background:

I had been to the Open Knowledge Conference last year (in Berlin), where I gave an invited talk on Open Palaeontology and met lots of brilliant people in the Open Science community like Bjoern Brembs, Cameron Neylon & Peter Murray-Rust. But this year the event was even bigger, and even better – teaming up with the annual Open Government Data Camp for a mega-event.

The Event Itself:

It was a little awkward that it was held so far away from most of the conference accommodation – everyone had a 20-30 minute commute before getting to the venue, and some of the talk rooms were fairly far apart. But once the conference goers got used to that it was plain sailing from there, and the Aalto University buildings themselves were wonderfully modern and well equipped for it (inc. great WiFi). I got to Helsinki on the Tuesday, and caught the tail end of the Data Journalism session that day including an excellent, inspirational talk on shippr.org amongst other things. It detailed the amazing knowledge and insight gained from tracking the movement of ships with open data. I couldn’t help thinking that academics could learn a lot from these open data visualization experts (myself included!).

An interesting example of Shippr data – ships turn off their beacons once they pass the point for fear of pirates…

Wednesday – my chance to make a difference

I really liked the way that the conference had an introductory session to the days parallel events in the morning from 10am – 11am. If one was unsure of which stream to go to – these Morning Plenaries gave each topic stream a chance to pitch their events in a short slot to the awaiting audience. I thought this was very helpful given there were 13 separate topic streams at the conference!

I was involved in two sessions this day. Firstly the Open Access discussion panel, the video for which is here with Tim Hubbard (Sanger Institute), Carlos Russel (World Bank), Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge / Open Knowledge Foundation) and Tom Olijhoek & Mark MacGillivray (Open Access Index):

It’s a long video, we covered many topics, with excellent contributions from the audience including Puneet Kishnor from Creative Commons and Matt Todd from the Open Source Drug Discovery team amongst others.

Then after this there was the research data session with contributions from Mark Wainwright on CKAN, Mark Hahnel on Figshare and Joss Winn of the Orbital project.

Finally we finished with the Panton Fellowships Session with talks from myself and Sophie Kershaw on what we’d been doing in our fellowship work:

The day was rounded off with a hugely inspirational talk from Matt Todd summarising his Open Source Drug Discovery work in the main lecture theatre, with a lovely if expensive meal afterwards in Lasipalatsi Ravintola.

Thursday

I spent some quality time with Peter working on a BBSRC grant proposal.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Hans Rosling’s fantastic key note presentation which I urge you all to watch – it was brilliant, and thrilling to be there live in the audience for.

Friday

If there’s one thing that impresses me most of all about OKFestival, it’s this: it’s not just about talking – they do things here too. Lots of ‘hacking’ sessions on Friday to create new tools and collate awesome new data. Most conferences are extremely boring in that it’s just talk after talk after talk. Things get done here, new collaborations are started, fresh links across disciplinary boundaries are made connecting journalism with academia, economic development with open architectural design, and other incredible trans-disciplinary mashups. It’s a joy to behold.

I’m really glad I came to OKFestival, as ever I got a lot out of it.

Next year it’ll be in Switzerland (?), I hope I didn’t just make that up… I seem to remember that it was announced to be there but I couldn’t find any confirmation from Google. Rest assured I’ll try and be there though!

The Gold OA plot v0.2

September 4th, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Open Access | Panton Fellowship updates - (14 Comments)

I said I would make an update on Tuesday (today), so if I get this posted before midnight I will (just) have met that  goal…

In this (minor) update I have:

added: Ubiquity Press (great low cost option!), SPIE (scored for 1-column per page), SAGE Open, Frontiers, WileyOpenAccess, OxfordOpen (OUP hybrid option), GigaScience, Open Biology (Royal Society)

added the label for: Pensoft (sincerest apologies, it is tied with Copernicus and was on the 0.1 plot, just unlabelled!)

changed the categorization of: Scientific Reports (NPG) [I have put it in a no-mans-land between CC BY and CC BY NC since they give authors a choice of licenses. I think this is a bad idea as it allows authors to make the mistake of choosing a less open licence (are there really any common circumstances in which they might want a less open, free to read licence?)]

 

As noted elsewhere there are actually a lot of completely fee-free Gold Open Access journals out there (I shall try and make a listing of them in a future post), they’re just not perhaps all that well-known. GigaScience and Open Biology (Royal Society) are temporarily completely fee-free options that certainly look like good recommendations!

 

I shall endeavour to add-in more of a variety of the various differently priced BMC journals in the next update of the plot. Basically I believe most of them lie in the range between BMC Research Notes, and BMC Biology.

My site stats show that in just a few days v0.1 of the plot had nearly 1000 pageviews, which is HUGE for my otherwise low-key blog!

And it has had real impact already. Thanks to Mike Taylor, Acta Pal. Polonica is thinking of adopting the CC BY licence. Brilliant news! It is fee-free but not explicitly licensed to allow re-use at the moment. Hopefully this will change soon.

 

Anyway, I have to get off the train now, so that’ll be the end of this post.

 

 

 

Revaluing Science in the Digital Age

September 4th, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Conferences | Content Mining | Open Access | Open Data | Panton Fellowship updates - (1 Comments)

Since Sunday afternoon I’ve been at an International Council for Science (ICSU) / Royal Society invited workshop on ‘Revaluing Science in the Digital Age’.

We’ve had a fascinating set of talks from academics, publishers (PLoS, Nature, BMC), librarians, policymakers, data managers, scientific societies…

Attendees included:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buneman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Boulton
Jose Cotta, European Commision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Ball

Mark Thorley (RCUK)
Chris Banks  (University Librarian and Director, Aberdeen)
Mark Hahnel (Figshare)
Max Wilkinson (UCL, Head of Research Data Service)
Dave Roberts (ViBRANT)
Rob Frost (GSK)
Catriona MacCallum (PLoS)
Mark Forster (Syngenta)
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz (BMC)
Ruth Wilson (Nature Publishing Group)
Kaitlin Thaney (Digital Science)
Stuart Taylor (Royal Society)
Robert Simpson (Zooniverse)
Paul Groth (OpenPHACTS)
and more…

 

I gave a talk on content mining and the importance of full BOAI-compliant Open Access with respect to this, on behalf of the Open Knowledge Foundation:

BOAI-compliant Open Access & content mining on Prezi

There was lots of discussion on reproducibility, provenance of data, peer review, incentives, research misconduct and ethics.

I’ve met many new people and have learnt many new things. For example, on the subject of reproducibility I talked about Roger Peng and the journal Biostatistics in discussion, and then was soon informed that there was an analogous journal in Chemistry called Organic Syntheses whereby:

In order for a procedure to be accepted for publication, each reaction must be successfully repeated in the laboratory of a member of the Editorial Board at least twice, with similar yields (generally ±5%) and selectivity similar to that reported by the submitters.

Fantastic! We were also informed that this rigorous protocol ensures that research published in this journal is very highly regarded. I’ve suggested similar such reproducibility checks for phylogenetics research before (at the Systematics Association Biennial meeting Belfast, 2011) but this was viewed as too futuristic / infeasible…

Right now we’re working on a draft statement of outcome from this workshop that ICSU can pass to its members to possibly officially agree to endorse.

So I better finish here, and get back to the discussion.
I’m rather hoping they will endorse the Panton Principles rather than reinvent the wheel (policy-wise).

Exciting times!

 

PS I have made a Storify of the tweets from the workshop here .

A visualization of Gold Open Access options

August 30th, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Open Access - (25 Comments)

To try and publicize the variety of Gold Open Access article publication options on offer, I’ve decided to create a visualization of the journal data that has previously been collected as part of my survey of ‘Open Access’ publisher licenses’ spreadsheet.

Here is version 0.1 of the ‘Mounce plot’ (much more data still to be added! It’s a work in progress) I may well refine and perhaps add a third axis or variable to the plot in future versions:

UPDATE: version 0.2 of the plot is now available here

 


 

Not all “open access” options provided by publishers actually provide BOAI-compliant Open Access, and this is very important - thus I have used the y-axis in this plot to reflect the level of openness supplied for the fees paid (x-axis). Therefore, the ‘best’ journals providing CC BY BOAI-compliant Open Access for the lowest fees possible appear in the top left of the plot. The ‘worst’ journals providing a far inferior level of openness for a high price appear in the bottom right of the plot. The lowest level of ‘free’ access is provided by journals and societies who provide free access to papers, but seem not to provide them with recognised standard licences such as those from the Creative Commons suite. Ambiguity is arguably the worst and laziest thing a publisher can offer from a re-user / reader POV and thus I score this as the lowest class.

 

Kudos then to Cellular Therapy and Transplantation , Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute , Copernicus Publications, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (an American Geosciences Union journal, ’tis a shame they charge $3500 for other AGU journals!), Standards in Genomics Sciences and others for providing low cost BOAI-compliant immediate Gold Open Access publishing options. [...and what a mouthful that last statement was. It is such a pity that the meaning of 'open access' has been degraded and loosely applied since it was originally (well)defined, that I have to apply so many additional adjectives to describe exactly what I mean.]

I’d be amazed if The Lancet & Cell Press journals (e.g. Cell) published by Elsevier could still get away with the absurdly high APC’s they ask for in 5 years time. I hope all researchers are sensible enough to realise that they can publish their manuscripts in other Open Access venues and have just the same research impact (and avoid these hugely expensive options).

I may well make further posts in future with updated, corrected and further explored and deliberated plots. There’s a lot still to talk about!

 

UPDATES:   I sometimes encounter academics who have never heard of fee waiver schemes before. If you look at this plot as an unfunded academic with no or little institutional funding, you might panic. DON’T : a lot of good Open Access publishers offer ‘fee waiver’ schemes to such academics that really cannot pay the APCs. Examples are PLoS and BMC . You can’t always get your fee waived but it is certainly worth asking if you think your circumstances deserve it.

PMR has noted that I have included some ‘predatory’ Open Access publishers in this plot e.g. the OMICS publishing group. I will just state that by placing publishers on this plot I am not especially endorsing any of them unless otherwise stated. There are of course other important criteria aside from ‘price’ and ‘openness’ in choosing where to submit a manuscript. Choose your venue wisely!

 

Further Reading:

[1] Page, R. 2010 http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/12/plant-list-nice-data-shame-it-not-open.html

[2] Murray-Rust, P. 2010 http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2010/12/17/why-i-and-you-should-avoid-nc-licences/

[3] Hagedorn, G., Mietchen, D., Morris, R., Agosti, D., Penev, L., Berendsohn, W., & Hobern, D. (2011). Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information ZooKeys, 150 DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.150.2189

[4] Carroll, M. W., Nov. 2011. Why full open access matters. PLoS Biol 9 (11), e1001210+. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001210

Technical notes:

  • Some journals charge a fee per page thus I have assumed 10 pages per article for my plot
  • Where fees are not listed in USD I have converted them into USD using the current exchange rates.
  • Where the journal permits authors to choose a licence I have assumed authors will choose the better, less restrictive licence option (although sadly, in reality some authors do opt for a more restrictive licence for their work).
  • Some journals offer discounted ‘OA fees’ if they are at a ‘member institution’ or some such. This usually involves additional cost to the member/subscribing institution thus I have used the full ‘non-member’ rate in such instances for a fairer comparison.
  • I only included a couple of BMC journals, just to show the range of prices offered (small: BMC Research Notes, and larger: BMC Biology). They split their prices quite finely between journals so I chose not to overcrowd the CC BY layer with too many BMC journals.
  • When I get time I’ll update WileyOpenAccess to the CC BY top class (they recently changed policy). Sadly, the Wiley OnlineOpen (hybrid) option, which is available to 100 times as many journals,  is still NC-restricted and less open.
  • Don’t see your publisher or Open Access option on the plot? Make your own plot then – the data is all there on the spreadsheet. I don’t doubt that many could make a better job of visualising it than I have done here…

Comments, extra data and/or corrections are welcome as always.  This data was hand-collected, so there may be errors.

Answers to questions about the SVP meeting abstract embargo

August 27th, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Panton Fellowship updates - (0 Comments)

Considering I emailed him on a Friday, Darin Croft has done well to reply to my questions about the SVP abstract embargo so soon, on Monday. I don’t always get such swift replies, so that is much appreciated. [Thanks Darin!]

Below is his email in full, as promised (the bits in quotes are my original questions) publicly supplied so the confusion can be cleared-up for all:

> 1.) What would happen if a researcher (and SVP member) deliberately broke
> the embargo and blogged/tweeted/published research that was the basis of
> their own submitted talk abstract (I’m surprised this hasn’t happened
> already tbh, given how early the abstract deadline is – some e-journals have
> very quick turnaround times…)

Our embargo is meant to protect the researchers themselves so that
they have greater control over when and how their research is made
accessible to members of the media. Therefore, our embargo policy does
not apply to a researcher publicizing their own work. This has, in
fact, happened many times already, typically in the scenario you note
(i.e., a researcher’s work is published after the abstract deadline
but before the annual meeting). Based on your question, perhaps this
is something we should clarify to avoid confusion.

> 2.) What would happen if a researcher (and SVP member) broke the embargo and
> blogged or tweeted some or all the of the content of another researcher’s
> talk abstract

This would most likely be referred to the SVP’s Ethics Committee,
which is the standard procedure in the case of possible violations of
the SVP’s Bylaws or policies by a member.

> 3.) If a blogger or journalist *did* write an article or two on the basis of
> the meeting abstract booklet – do you seriously think that could harm the
> chances of VP’ers getting published in one of the glamour mags?

I believe this has actually occurred in the past, though before my
tenure as Chair of the Media Liaison Committee. Regardless, I cannot
speak for what the editors of high profile journals might or might not
do in such an instance. I would suggest you contact them directly. Our
current policy is that the potential risk for researchers does not
outweigh any potential benefit.

I hope that information is useful. Thank you for letting me know
beforehand that you plan to publish these responses.

Cheers,

Darin

————————————————–
[End of email]

So, from that it seems we can at least talk about our own abstracts. I still disagree that the potential ‘risk’ of freely accessible abstracts outweighs the benefits, but I’ll leave it there for now – I’m just happy to let you all know what my talk is about without fear of losing the talk slot!

I thoroughly agree with Darin that they should change the wording of the policy next year to make this clearer, because frankly what is written in the embargo policy currently (as emailed to all conference registrants) clearly contradicts what Darin says here, and I’m not the only one to have been confused and slightly annoyed by this.

I’d also be intrigued to know more about the SVP’s Ethics Committee procedures, Bylaws and rules. Perhaps there is a URL for these somewhere? But I will not pursue that any further now.

That just leaves me to say that my talk for this year’s SVP will be:

EXAMINING CHARACTER CONGRUENCE AND COMPATIBILITY OF VERTEBRATE CLADISTIC DATA – EMPIRICAL APPROACHES APPLIED COMPARATIVELY ACROSS CLADES

by Ross Mounce & Matthew A Wills, University of Bath

Previous phylogenetic work using conventional character partition homogeneity tests has
often revealed significant incongruence between cranial and postcranial character data. We
extend this approach by applying pairwise character compatibility tests across a sample of
more than 60 pseudo-independent vertebrate data sets. We contrast ‘fuzzy’ compatibility,
boildown bootstrap and clique approaches. In particular, we find that the Le Quesne
probability (LQP) has several desirable properties. The LQP is simply the probability that a
randomly permuted character will have incompatibility with other characters in the matrix
as low or lower than that of the original character. Within recent analyses of Sauropod taxa
we find that characters related to neural arches often conflict with dental characters in some
datasets but it is difficult to generalise; we are still exploring possible causative mechanisms
for this. In contrast, other vertebrate groups such as ratites appear to have relatively
little character conflict between morphological characters. Pairwise tests of character
compatibility work well with binary data and ordered multistate characters, but can only give
an indication of ‘potential compatibility’ with unordered multistate characters. Composite
‘higher’ taxa and polymorphic codes are also problematic for existing compatibility
software, typically creating artificial incompatibilities. We recommend that composite taxa
are decomposed into their constituents in order to remove ambiguity for the purpose of these
tests, or else that polymorphic states are treated as missing data.

It’s part review, part defence of an oft ignored method, and part meta-analysis of lots of datasets using congruence methods to look at character compatibility. It forms part of my thesis work on comparing different statistical methods to compare and contrast the utility & congruence of morphological characters in phylogenetic analyses.

Great to be able to talk about my research without worry :)

Some further questions for SVP about their talk abstract embargo

August 24th, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Conferences | Open Access | Palaeontology - (0 Comments)

I just sent this email to Darin Croft (of SVP). I chose to contact him because he recently answered questions about the embargo for EmbargoWatch and it was rather unclear who else I should approach. I did not want to blanket email the whole council.

This is the (entire) email I sent him, from my gmail account:
(I will post his reply as and when I receive it)

Dear Darin,

It’s been noted many times before, by many different researchers – but the SVP meeting abstract embargo just doesn’t make sense to me. I know of no other conference that operates like this, and indeed for most other conferences the abstract booklet (and it’s open, free availability online) is a big promotional aid in getting people interested in the event in the lead-up to it.

I saw you answered some questions on EmbargoWatch recently, so I thought you might be the correct person to contact for my queries on the same subject:

I have blogged my own displeasure with the embargo policy here:
http://rossmounce.co.uk/2012/08/23/the-ridiculous-svp-embargo-is-back-again/

I would like to ask:

1.) What would happen if a researcher (and SVP member) deliberately broke the embargo and blogged/tweeted/published research that was the basis of their own submitted talk abstract (I’m surprised this hasn’t happened already tbh, given how early the abstract deadline is – some e-journals have very quick turnaround times…)

2.) What would happen if a researcher (and SVP member) broke the embargo and blogged or tweeted some or all the of the content of another researcher’s talk abstract

3.) If a blogger or journalist *did* write an article or two on the basis of the meeting abstract booklet – do you seriously think that could harm the chances of VP’ers getting published in one of the glamour mags?

I look forward to hearing from you, and will publish your response in full context with this email on my blog

Best,

Ross

–
–
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Ross Mounce
PhD Student & Panton Fellow
Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07

http://about.me/rossmounce

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

The ridiculous SVP embargo is back again

August 23rd, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Conferences | Open Access | Palaeontology - (9 Comments)

Sometimes you just have to laugh…

The year is 2012, we have the internet, we have blogs, and a huge variety of other tools to enable free, efficient and rapid communication of information and yet the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting rules still insist that all information within this year’s abstract booklet remain a big secret until the day of the event.

Many others have justly written to complain about this before.

Here’s the 2012 version I just received in my inbox today:

SVP Embargo Policy Regarding Content in the Program and Abstract Book

Unless specified otherwise, coverage of abstracts presented orally at the Annual Meeting is strictly prohibited until the start time of the presentation, and coverage of poster presentations is prohibited until the relevant poster session opens for viewing. As defined here, “œcoverage” includes all types of electronic and print media; this includes blogging, tweeting and other intent to communicate or disseminate results or discussion presented at the SVP Annual Meeting. Content that may be pre-published online in advance of print publication is also subject to the SVP embargo policy.

So I think I can tell you I’m giving a talk there in the ‘Phylogenetic and Comparative Paleobiology — New Approaches to the Study of Vertebrate Macroevolution’ symposium.

But can I tell you what the title of my talk is, or the abstract I submitted (a rather long time ago, which is another bugbear I have with this particular conference)? Well, given the quote above, probably not!

And therein is part of the ridiculousness of the embargo. By submitting a (subsequently accepted) talk & abstract to this conference – I’m banned from communicating about my own research on that subject until I give the talk. Not even a tweet about it.

It also seems to me that they’re preventing their own members from effectively promoting the event with this policy. Wouldn’t it be great if all speakers could blog and tweet: “Hey, I’m giving a talk on new dinosaur XXXX and it’s unusual anatomy (further details of which are in my abstract here) at a meeting in Raleigh, NC. Come along, tickets still available here” Isn’t that 100 times better than “Hey, I’m giving a talk at this conference – I can’t tell you what the title is or the subject, sorry” ?

This policy strikes me as a massive and unjustified own goal. I appreciate some of the science glamour mags don’t take kindly to press reportage of science before it is published in their glossy pages BUT I think we’ve got to remember that science talks & posters are NOT papers, and they should not and are not treated as such. The abstracts for SVP are only minimally peer-reviewed before acceptance and the talk content itself is completely unreviewed. Therefore if a journalist/blogger/tweeter did report on the abstract booklet (and btw, it would take tremendous journalistic spin to make good, interesting copy from most talk abstracts I’ve ever seen – they’re rather short!) they’d be reporting non-peer reviewed discussion, that may or may not be related to unspecified future peer-reviewed publications. So I don’t buy [what I presume is the justification for all this?] the argument that reportage of talk abstracts jeopardises the publication of peer-reviewed papers. The two may be related, but are also very distinct from each other.

I think it’s only a matter of time until this policy changes. SVP have being doing reasonably well with respect to openness recently. They’ve reduced their hybrid Open Access fees, and instituted new editorial policy encouraging data archiving so that data published in their journal is more transparent & re-usable (=better science). But it seems there are still improvements to be made. Will there be an abstract embargo in 2013 I wonder? I for one hope not.

Open Access discussed on the radio

August 20th, 2012 | Posted by rmounce in Open Access - (0 Comments)

[I'm cross posting this from the OKFN version so I can embed the audio of the show in the post]

Last Friday (17/08/12), representing the Open Knowledge Foundation, I had the pleasure of discussing the new Research Councils UK (RCUK) plan for all UK publicly-funded research to be published Open Access, on a special half hour Voice of Russia UK broadcast radio discussion.

I have written about this policy before and am very supportive of it, just as I am with Open Access in academia in general. I personally believe it will aid transparency and equality in research – so that no researcher has an unfair advantage over another through greater/easier access to vital research literature (just one of many worthy benefits arising from Open Access). But there are certainly also vocal opponents to this plan – mostly those with vested interests in keeping the obscene profits of the traditional subscription access publishing system alive (which commonly generate >30% profit margins largely derived from the taxpayer-spending of the world’s research libraries on journal subscriptions). Whilst others express vague and often unspecified “concerns” about Open Access and further still many academics are notably apathetic towards it, or are even proudly agnostic on the issue.

Thus a publicly-broadcast discussion of this new open policy is well warranted.

No secret science
Voice of Russia UK radio Open Access discussion hosted by Daniel Cinna
I won’t say anything about the discussion itself, only that you should listen to it (embedded above; alt link here) if you are at all interested in the future of science, and the benefits of the new RCUK Open Access policy.

The members of the discussion panel included Rita Gardner, the Director of the Royal Geographical Society, noted for her concerns about the potential effects of Open Access on UK Learned Society income and revenue [paywalled link]; Ross Mounce, Panton Fellow promoting open data in science (myself) from the Open Knowledge Foundation; Bjorn Brembs, Professor at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leipzig, noted critic of for-profit publishers and their lack of ‘value-add’ amongst other issues; and Timothy Gowers, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, instigator of the popular academic-led boycott of the academic for-profit publisher Elsevier.

The ensuing discussion was ably guided by VoiceofRussia radio presenter Daniel Cinna, and recorded by a backroom team with an impressively professional studio setup (Timothy & Bjorn were joining the debate via phone from abroad almost seemlessly, whilst Rita and I were in the London studio). As noted by Rita off-air, it would have been nice to have had a publisher representative in the discussion to add their unique viewpoint but apparently the VoR production team had asked, but no for-profit publisher they had asked was willing to take part. So one cannot attribute any blame to the VoR team if the discussion panel lacked representational balance.

About Voice of Russia (adapted from their own website):

The Voice of Russia is the world’s oldest international broadcaster and is among the world’s top five radio broadcasters today which include the BBC, the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and Radio France International. The London-based team produces programs for VoR that bring our listeners a Russian perspective on our two countries and the world. VoR broadcasts to 160 countries in 38 languages using short and medium waves, FM, satellite and the global communications network. In London we are now also available online and via DAB radio. We aim to welcome a new British audience to our 109 million listeners worldwide.