Open Science Prize finalists include Open Air Quality and Real-time Pathogen Surveillance. 

The six finalists for the Open Science Prize were announced today.  The Open Science Prize is “The Open Science Prize is a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to unleash the power of open content and data to advance biomedical research and its …

Very useful (for scientists too): How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

From vaccinations to climate change, getting science wrong has very real consequences. But journal articles, a primary way science is communicated in academia, are a different format to newspaper a… Source: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists This article, by Jennifer Raff, is definitely worth a read and I …

Worth a Read: Sloan Foundation President Dr. Paul Joskow on “Research Integrity and Reproducibility”

I just got pointed to this letter written by the President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Paul Joskow on “Research Integrity and Reproducibility” and it is definitely worth a read. It is available as part of the Sloan Foundation 2014 Annual report. It starts on pXiii.  It is also available via Research Gate.  And …

Journal Club: Crowdfunding Science

What is better than Open Access?! Citizen Science AND Open Access! The March issue of JMBE was all that. You have probably already heard of Kittybiome and/or The Koala Project, 2 ongoing projects in the Eisen Lab. Both projects were featured in the paper, “Crowdfunding Campaigns Help Researchers Launch Projects and Generate Outreach”, published in …

A Figshare Collection on Microbiology of the Built Environment

I got an email the other day about a new feature at Figshare.  It was about a new feature they have called “Collections“. But before I describe that I should probably describe Figshare.  Figshare is a repository for depositing and sharing various digital objects including not just Figures (which they name kind of implies … …

Announcement of VERVE Net on protocols.io — a forum for discussing methods in virus ecology

Posting this which I received by email: Colleagues, We are thrilled to announce the launch of VERVE Net (https://www.protocols.io/g/verve-net), an on-line platform that equips the virus ecology community with a means to easily run, modify, publish and discuss laboratory, field and bioinformatic protocols. The forum also provides new ways to navigate the literature (a publication …

Gearing up the UNITE database for the built mycobiome

Gearing up the UNITE database for the built mycobiome The team behind the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi has been granted support from the Sloan Foundation to strengthen the support for fungi from the built environment. Launched in 2001 as an ITS database for identification of ectomycorrhizal fungi in the Nordic countries, UNITE …

Request for comments on scikit-bio: should we drop support for Python 2 in favor of Python 3 only?

scikit-bio is a library implementing core bioinformatics algorithms and data structures, and providing support for bioinformatics data munging. You can learn more about the project by watching Jai Rideout and Evan Bolyen’s 20 minute SciPy 2015 talk. scikit-bio currently supports Python 2 (i.e., Legacy Python) and Python 3. We’re considering dropping support for Python 2, …