Thanks to generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Mozilla Science is ecstatic to announce that we have awarded our first three mini-grants in support of project ideas fostering open innovation, efficiency in regards to practicing open science, and reproducibility.
Read on to learn more about these innovators in our community and their projects:
Project: Preprint Journal Club Starter Kit
Leads: Samantha Hindle & Daniela Saderi (Twitter: @PREreview_)
Institutions: University of California San Francisco; Oregon Health & Science University
The process of publishing in the biological sciences has become lengthier over the past 30 years, often taking several months to a year from journal submission to publication. Preprints provide a solution to this problem as they are manuscripts that are free and immediately accessible to everyone. The Preprint Journal Club Starter Kit is being developed to encourage and support the discussion of preprints at journal clubs at research institutions around the world. Project Leads also recently launched a platform powered by Authorea (PREreview.org) where researchers can collaboratively write preprint reviews and get a citable DOI for free in order to promote community-wide discussions about preprints and increase their use in the biological sciences.
Get involved here: https://github.com/SamanthaHindle/preprint_JournalClub
Project: Brain Networks in Python
Lead: Isla Staden (GitHub: @islast)
Institution: Alan Turing Institute
The brain is made up of many regions that communicate millions of messages every second. Traditional neuroimaging analyses have considered each region separately and therefore failed to capture many aspects of brain structure and function. The Brain Networks in Python project provides open source, documented, tested and modular code to investigate the brain as a network. These analyses are reproducible, transparent and accessible to new and expert brain imaging researchers and network neuroscientists.
Get involved here: https://github.com/WhitakerLab/BrainNetworksInPython
Project: Immersed in Embryogenesis
Lead: Paul Villoutreix (Twitter: @paulvilloutreix)
Institutions: Princeton University; The New School, Center for Data Arts; Weizmann Institute of Science
Datasets of embryogenesis are 3D+time image datasets with multiple modalities. These datasets are notoriously complex to visualize and can be challenging to understand without a good spatial understanding of the multiple dimensions involved. There is a need to improve the ways in which researchers and the public interact with these datasets. This project will extend The Embryo Digital Atlas, an open-source web-based platform for the visualization of complex experimental datasets related to embryogenesis, through development of an open-source library in javascript to interface microscopy images of embryonic development with a Virtual Reality headset.
Get involved here: https://github.com/paulvill/paulvill.github.io