We had our monthly community call last week. (If you missed it you can read the Etherpad notes from the call.) As usual, we asked participants to let us know what they’re excited about — upcoming events, links of interest, projects and tools:

Articles, Blog Posts and Other Things To Read

• Eric Kansa wrote a great post on why instrumentalist arguments for “open” may not be enough.
• Faye Flam at Knight Science Journalism Tracker wrote a response to a column/post in the New York Times on data and reproducibility in science.
• Ivan Oransky asks, Is it time for a reproducibility index for journals?
• Lior Shamir et al. have written a paper on practices in code sharing in astrophysics.
• Nicole Janz, Seth Werfel, and Stephanie Wykstra wrote a post on the Monkey Cage on replication in political science.

Tools and Projects

• There is a major update to Synbiota’s open-science platform, and walkthrough videos are available.
• At Solvers.io, programmers and other highly skilled volunteers can find great open projects to contribute to, and projects can recruit volunteers. It’s still in development, but if you have an open (science or otherwise) project, they’d love to add it to to their launch list.
• EcoData Retriever is a tool for downloading, cleaning, and installing ecological data into your database management system of choice. It’s open source, on GitHub and written in Python. You can find out more in this blog post.
• Brainomics is an ongoing research project with a live demo featuring an open dataset of clinical and neuroimaging data served by Cubic Web, an Open Source Semantic Web framework. For an overview, have a look at the poster. For more details contact brainomics@logilab.fr.

Funds, Grants and Awards

• A $300,000 fund from SOSVentures is available to support your (open or closed) biotech/life-science projects on Synbiota.

Announcements and Updates

• The Galaxy community has published the first GigaScience papers using a Galaxy server to help visualize the datasets, workflows, and histories in a publication, and then execute them. Read their blog post for background.
• e-Biogenouest is a Virtual Research Environment for life sciences communities in Western France. They intend to create a robust production environment as a complete eScience initiative in their region.

Upcoming Events: Open Science IRL

• #Sciencechat happens every other Wednesday 6PM PST/9 EST. Join a panel of experts on Twitter with the hashtag #sciencechat to discuss the latest in science, reasearch, collaboration, etc. It’s fast paced, but fun!
• The Citizen Cyberscience Summit is on 20-22 February 2014.
• The First Open Science Barcamp (and “apéro”) on February 25 in Toulouse, France, organized by Hack Your PhD and Logilab.
• rOpenSci is having a hackathon at the end of March in San Francisco to build R tools for open science. It’s invite only, but get in touch if you are interested in coming.
• Mozilla Science Lab is running a Software Carpentry bootcamp for Women in Science and Engineering on April 14-15 in Berkeley — registration is open here.
• Software Carpentry is also running a series of bootcamps immediately after PyCon (April 14-15) in Montreal — one “regular” bootcamp plus a one-day master class on R for Python users, and a one-day master class on next-generation sequencing (NGS) and other topics in bioinformatics. Please help spread the word to scientists you know in the Montreal region.
• Software Carpentry’s first-ever live instructor training session is coming up on April 28-30. Registration is only $80. The session will take place in sunny (we hope) Toronto at the Mozilla offices.
• The reproducibility@XSEDE workshop 14-17 July 2014 in Atlanta will respond to the challenges in the 2009 Yale Data and Code Sharing Roundtable declaration: “demanding a resolution to the credibility crisis from the lack of reproducible research in computational science”.