Open Science

In this page I list links to articles discussing Open Science, data storage and handling, and Big Data issues.

Attendees did converge on several guiding principles for an international project. All agreed, for example, on the need for better vetting, sharing, and storing of neuroscience data. “The raw data gathered by generations of graduate students and postdocs has been lost because we haven't come up with a good system for archiving and sharing data,” said neuroscientist Michael Hausser of University College London.

To address that problem, the group proposed creating an online resource tentatively dubbed the International Brain Station. Inspired in part by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a digital repository of telescope images containing hundreds of thousands of galaxies and other heavenly bodies, the brain counterpart would provide a portal into vast amounts of neuroscience data, which both scientists and the general public could access by computer.

  • Taking the online medicine, The Economist 19 March 2016. "Old-fashioned ways of reporting new discoveries are holding back medical research. Some scientists are pushing for change." Discusses the emergence of bioRxiv, the pre-print server modelled on arXiv, a well-established physics pre-print site, and the challenges for the evolution of a new publication model for the life sciences.
  • Amid Public Feuds, A Venerated Medical Journal Finds Itself Under Attack by Charles Ornstein. ProPublica 5 April 2016. About the New England Journal of Medicine and its infamous statement about "research parasites".
  • Vetenskapens problem handlar inte om fusk by me. Dagens Nyheter 6 April 2016. An opinion piece in the main Swedish daily newspaper, part of a debate about shoddy science that started after the Macchiarini scandal broke. It's a response to a previous article by Roland Paulsen.
  • Eight things I learnt from #tardigate by Mark Blaxter. 3 April 2016. How the badly mistaken conclusion about vast amounts of horizontal gene transfer into the tardigrade genome could be corrected quickly thanks in part to Open Science. Essential reading!
  • What is important, and what is not, for bioscience data handling by me. 4 April 2016. The researcher's needs are important. Open Science is important. The bureaucracy's needs are not.
  • The mess in bioscience data handling by me. 2 April 2016. The current state in Swedish bioscience (life science) data handling is pretty bad. Especially considering the goal of Open Science.
  • MolScript: A story of success and failure by me. 3 Nov 2014. The story of a not-quite-Open-Source piece of software, which now is Open Source. The publication for it was on the list of "the 100 most highly cited papers of all time" in 2014.