Some thoughts on a GitHub of Science

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“Lately, I've been thinking more about issues surrounding Open Science and scientific publishing. This post is in part a response to posts by Scott Chamberlain and Marcio von Muhlen. Marcio's idea represents a major call-to-arms for innovation in how science is conducted and communicated. He states that "we need a social network of science, meaning scientific bundles of knowledge must be structured and accessible by API, with the connections among those bundles and appropriate utility metrics being what connects and prioritizes scientists." I would completely agree here. Making small steps, this is why I chose to post my latest paper to the arXiv and to GitHub itself... Scott questions whether GitHub could be useful as a scientific publishing platform, which I think is a very different thing from Marcio's GitHub of Science. Here, as publishing platform, I think the primary advantage of GitHub is the versioning system at its heart. This would allow an audience to follow a scientific story as is progresses, but would also allow the history of a project to be queried and individual contributions to be easily assessed (at least in terms of writing and coding). If we want to move towards a system of post publication peer review there needs to be a good way of continually updating a manuscript and making it obvious what each new version brings... However, I think the potential for something like a GitHub of Science goes much farther than just a publishing platform. In the current paradigm, manuscripts are built on top of manuscripts, but there is a lot of replicated effort... The basic paradigm of GitHub is the forking of a software project. I write some code, you take what I've done and make some additions. I then have the option of folding your changes back into my version, or if I'm not happy with your changes, the two versions continue on their separate ways... In a conversation with Ben Fry about this, he commented that the most beneficial aspect of peer review is that it forces scientists to work in such a way that their research can be reviewed, and, at least in theory, replicated. Working in such a way that research could be forked would be a much higher, better, bar in terms of documentation and reproducibility. There is continual innovation in terms of models for Open Science (Stack Exchange, arXiv,GitHub, etc...). I'm hopeful that we can eventually come up with something that gains some traction. However, I'm sure that whatever we start with, it has to has to produce a publishable end product, so that both old and new systems could continue forward, existing side-by-side.”

Link:

http://www.trevorbedford.com/archive/feb_20_2012.html

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.comment oa.green oa.open_science oa.peer_review oa.arxiv oa.floss oa.github oa.publishing oa.versions oa.stack_exchange oa.repositories

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 14:53

Date published:

02/23/2012, 15:28