Save the Date: Mozilla Science Lab Community Call, May 14

Our next community call will take place this Thursday, May 14. The call is open to the public and will start at 11:00 am ET. Call in details can be found on the call etherpad (where you can also find notes and the agenda) and on the wiki. (If you have trouble with the toll-free number, try one of the numbers at the bottom of this post.)

The Science Lab meeting is our community call, taking place each month, highlighting recent developments and work of the community relevant to science and the web. Join us to hear more about current projects, find out how you can get involved, and hear from others about their work in and around open research.

This month, we’ll be hearing from some of the project leads for the upcoming Mozilla Science Global Sprint, June 4 & 5, #mozsprint. This is our second annual Global Sprint, sister event to our sprint in London at the Mozilla Festival each fall; at each of these events, we invite projects from across open research, from scientific applications to publishing to infrastructure and education, to come sprint on their goals while highlighting their work to the community and welcoming new collaborators. Check out the list of projects and sites on the main etherpad, find some more details for some of the projects on their Collaborate listings, and please remember to sign up if you’re planning on attending any of the 25+ co-working sites around the world!

First on the call, Jai Rideout will be talking about a project with Greg Caporaso to improve support for authoring books from an IPython Notebook, in support of their Sloan-funded Introduction to Applied Bioinformatics. Check out the milestone collection of issues they’ll be sprinting on here.

Tim Gardner from Riffyn will be joining us to discuss his plans to build a natural language tool to mine text from PLoS. The project would like to extract statistics and context of term usage from the journal, to aid in constructing and maintaining scientific ontologies.

Achintya Rao of CERN will be joining us to describe two projects being brought by the international lab; Cosmic Rays For Everyone, a project to crowdsource the measurement of cosmic rays using inexpensive hardware, and GitHub Science Badges, a project led by Laura Rueda to create simple visual badges for GitHub repositories, displaying meaningful information for the scientific community like licenses, DOIs and more.

Stuart Lynn is leading two projects at #mozsprint that he’ll be speaking about on the call: The Open Journal, a project to scaffold creating reviews for any content on the web, and the Journal of Brief Ideas, a new online journal providing archiving, search and citation infrastructure to papers from any field – so long as they’re less than 200 words.

Finally, we’ll also be joined by Graham Steel from Content Mine, telling us about opportunities to get involved with the data extraction project.

These are only a few of the several dozen projects people will be sprinting on in June – see the full list here, and remember to sign up on the same etherpad if you plan on attending one of the co-working sites.

Have an update, blog post or event you’d like to share relevant to open science? Add it to the etherpad (see ‘Non Verbal Updates’, line ~80). It’s a great way to share what you’re working on and/or interested in with the community. Don’t be shy. Have a look at last month’s notes for an idea of what others contributed to the conversation.

Mark your calendars, tune in and help us spread the word – everyone is welcome. For call-in details and links to the etherpad, visit our wiki page. We hope you’ll join us.

Note: Having trouble dialing in? Try one of these numbers. (Note that they are toll calls and you’ll be charged by your telephone company if the number is long-distance.)

After you enter the extension, you’ll be asked for the conference ID, which is 7677.

  • US/California/Mountain View: +1 650 903 0800, extension 92
  • US/California/San Francisco: +1 415 762 5700, extension 92
  • US/Oregon/Portland: +1 971 544 8000, extension 92
  • CA/Vancouver: +1 778 785 1540, extension 92
  • CA/Toronto: +1 416 848 3114, extension 92
  • UK/London: +44 (0)207 855 3000, extension 92
  • FR/Paris: +33 1 44 79 34 80, extension 92
  • DE/Berlin: +49 30 983 333 000, extension 92
  • NZ/Auckland: +64 9 555 1100, extenstion 92