We held our monthly community call last week, and as always we asked our community members to post links to their latest projects, events, and discoveries to the call’s etherpad. Thanks to everyone who shared! Here’s what you wanted the world to know about:
Upcoming Events
On 16th Jan 2014 WriteLaTeX is organising an event to celebrate the New Year and the exciting changes in science and science publishing at the British Library, London. Ping @writelatex or @drhammersley if you’d like to find out more. The event also marks the launch of the Rich Text version of writeLaTeX. (From John Hammersley)
Announcements and Updates (and Pre-Announcements!)
The British Library and Cottage Labs are running a competition called Visualising Research: bringing public data to life. Entrants must use publicly accessible data from UK research council projects to “produce images that will show how … public funding contributes to research in the UK”.
A 2015 workshop on “Python in Astronomy” is in the works. We would like to figure out how to include participation from non-astro Open Sci/etc: contact P. Barmby
Several members of our community wrote a paper entitled “Best Practices in Scientific Computing”. The paper discusses research-based best practices for scientific coding which are key to doing science on the web. The paper was recently published in PLOS Biology.
To be formally announced soon: F1000Research is now accepting papers about science communication (in addition to our existing coverage of the life sciences), which includes any papers/commentaries/reviews related to Open Science or Open Access. Throughout 2014, papers on scicomm topics will not be charged an article-processing charge, so we welcome any formal write-ups of any of these projects. (From Eva Amsen)
Tools and Projects
ScienceGist: Science gists are simplified summaries of scientific papers. Our goal is to bring science closer to everyone. Lots of new things are coming to ScienceGist in 2014: a browser extension so that simple summaries are accessible from anywhere, Open Annotation standard so that you can export them to any other annotation service through our API, alt metrics for written gists so that our contributors know what their impact is. We’re also looking for brilliant developers (yes, you!) who are passionate about scientific communication: Contact info@sciencegist.com.
InterdisciplinaryProgramming.com, a project by Bill Mills (TRIUMF) and Angelina Fabbro (Mozilla) is a service to match professional software developers with scientists seeking code mentorship. Since last time, backend development is complete and they are on track for a Q1 launch of the full service. Sign up for the news mailing list at the website.
CANARIE provides a repository of software services for research that are tested and monitored for reliability. Most are open source and community contributions are welcome.
CodersCrowd is a site aimed at making code review a concrete issue for scientists, and is soliciting advice/commentary.
OpenArticleGauge is a service by Cottage Labs which determines the license for journal articles. (Development of the tool is supported by PLoS.) OpenArticleGauge is getting a polish this month — if anybody wants to have a chat about scholarly licensing, just mail Emanuil Tolev (OAG dev). Any feedback will really help to make this into a useful tool for the open science community! All OpenArticleGauge code is on Github (good place for feedback too).
Articles and other reading matter
The AAS Working Group on Astronomical Software (WGAS) and the ASCL held a session at AAS earlier this week called “Astrophysics Code Sharing II: The Sequel”. It was standing room only and included some python folks. (From Daniel S. Katz.)
With respect to the discussion about versioning in the last call, here is a description of how a common resource versioning pattern used on the web works with the Memento “web time travel” protocol from Herbert Van de Sompel. He also shared slides from a presentation on Hiberlink he did at CNI in December. The presentation is about reference rot in scholarly communication, and is related to linking to dynamic scholarly resources.
Nature Genetics published an editorial statement on code sharing: Credit for Code.
Many thanks to everyone who contributed, and we hope you’ll join us for our next community call on February 13!