Mozilla Science Lab Week in Review, April 6-12

Mozilla

The Week in Review is our weekly roundup of what’s new in open science from the past week. If you have news or announcements you’d like passed on to the community, be sure to share on Twitter with @mozillascience and @billdoesphysics, or join our mailing list and get in touch there.

Blogs & Articles

  • Erin McKiernan put the call out on Twitter last week for examples of collaborations arising from open science & open data, and got a great spectrum (from worm simulations to text mining Phillip K. Dick) of responses; see her summary here.
  • Hackaday interviewed Charles Fracchia of the MIT Media Lab on the need and impact of open hardware in open science. Fracchia makes the observation that reproducibility is well-served by distributing standardized data collection hardware that can be deployed in many labs & conditions.
  • Figshare blogged recently about decisions taken by the US Health & Human Services department obliging its operating divisions to make government funded research data available to the public.
  • Jonathan Rochkind blogged on the general unusability of institutional library paywall & login systems, and discusses potential solutions in the form of LibX, bookmarklets and Zotero & co.
  • Nature Biotechnology is engaging in more proactive editorial oversight to ensure the reproducibility of the computational studies it publishes, by way of ensuring the availability of relevant research objects.
  • Shoaib Sufi blogged for the Software Sustainability Institute on their recent Collaborations Workshop 2015. In it, Sufi highlights some of the trends emerging in the conversation around developing research software, including the cultural battle in research with imposter phenomenon (see also our recent article on this matter), and the rising profile of containerization as a fundamental tool for reproducible research.

Conferences & Meetings

  • OpenCon 2015 has been announced for 14-16 November, in Brussels, Belgium. From the conference’s website, ‘the event will bring together students and early career academic professionals from across the world to learn about the issues, develop critical skills, and return home ready to catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the world’s information — from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital data.‘ Applications for OpenCon open on 1 June; updates are available from their mailing list. Also, here’s Erin McKiernan’s thoughts on OpenCon 2014.
  • Jake VanderPlas gave a great talk on Fast Numerical Computing with NumPy at PyCon 2015 on Friday.
  • The European Space Agency is organizing a conference entitled Earth Observation Science 2.0 at ESRIN, Frascati, Italy, on 12-14 October.  Topics include open science & data, citizen science, data visualization and data science as they pertain to earth observation; submissions are open until 15 May.
  • The French National Natural History Museum is planning three open forums on biodiversity, designed to collect broad-based input to inform the theme and goals of a forthcoming observatory. The project extends the principles of citizen science to include the public in the discussion surrounding not just data collection, but scientific program design.

Tools & Services

  • Harvard’s Dataverse.org project has made CC0 the default license for all data deposited therein in their version 4.0, citing the license’s familiarity to the open data community.
  • The US Federal government’s open data portal, data.gov, has created a new theme section highlighting climate & human health data. From their website, ‘The Human Health Theme section allows users to access data, information, and decision tools describing and analyzing climate change impacts on public health. Extreme heat and precipitation, air pollution, diseases carried by vectors, and food and water-borne illnesses are just some of the topics addressed in these resources.‘
  • GitHub is inviting users to participate in a test of their forthcoming support for the new Git large file storage extension to the popular version control system.
  • The Ocean Observation Initiative, a multi-site array of heavily instrumented underwater observatories, is set to come on-line in June. Data from the OOI is slated for open access distribution.