Open research can lead to new drugs tackling diseases that afflict the world's poor. But first, more scientists need to buy into contributing to something bigger than their careers
The Guardian.
The GitHub generation doesn't seem to like the bother of licenses, but is it prepared to stomach the costs? (...) As new research from Black Duck Software shows, today's developers aren't just moving away from the General Public License (GPL). They're moving away from open-source licensing altogether. Analyzing over one million projects on GitHub and other code repositories, Black Duck Software found that while 40% of open-source projects industry-wide carry no declared license, 77% of projects on GitHub have no declared license, open source or otherwise.See also GitHub's open source license webpage.
In the largest open-source video-data sharing project of its kind, behavioral researchers, digital library scientists, and computer scientists are undertaking the creation of Databrary, a web-based video-data library sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).The Databrary project includes not only a web-based repository for open sharing and preservation of video data and associated metadata, but also a free, open source video-coding software, that enables coding, exploring, and analyzing video data. The data management system supports data-sharing within labs, among collaborators, and in the Databrary repository. Read more here.
Open access to validated molecular components is crucial to the field’s success, says Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University in California. Endy says that synthetic biologists are similar to software engineers, with the genetic code as their programming language. The software industry has favoured open-source approaches and copyright protections, because inventions often come faster than patents can be acquired. The same holds for synthetic biology (...).Nature.
A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat.The New York Times.
Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. More fundamentally, Scalar is a semantic web authoring tool that brings a considered balance between standardization and structural flexibility to all kinds of material. It includes a built-in reading interface as well as an API that enables Scalar content to be used to drive custom-designed applications. If you’re dealing with small to moderate amounts of structured content and need a lightweight platform that encourages improvisation with your data model, Scalar may be the right solution for you.
There’s an inherent flaw in modern academia: scholars are expected to publish in “high ranking” journals, foundational compilations of academic articles that—over time—have become engrained in the institutional social fabric of knowledge production within the academy.Blog entry on Open Source.
Check out this presentation by Björn Brembs.
Hear him speak live, tomorrow at the DataCite Workshop in Köln.
mMass is an open source software to make open science projects easily accessible.
Lange haben einige einflussreiche Wissenschaftszeitschriften den Markt dominiert. Doch in Zeiten des Internets schwindet ihre Vormachtstellung allmählich. Denn immer mehr Forschungsergebnisse sind kostenfrei zugänglich. Die Informationsgesellschaft profitiert davon.
Spiegel Online. (In German)