Guest post: You should be doing “open science”–and we’ll help you! | Dynamic Ecology
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-16
Summary:
"Open science and open data is in the process of revolutionizing how research is done in the 21st century. It allows researchers to access more data than they could ever collect as individuals. But unlike in the movies though, just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. That’s where rOpenSci comes in. We build packages for R, the most common scientific programming language among life scientists, to access the wealth of open data that’s out there. If you want to access the phylogenetic trees on Treebase, we have a package for you. If you want to map species distributions using the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (aka GBIF), we have a package for that too. You can see a full list of our packages on our webpage. Our goal is to make using open data easier for biologists. But R still has a steep learning curve. So we want to help bring awareness and access to open data and make sure that everyone can leverage this tremendous resource. To that end let me introduce therOpenSci Open Science Challenge. We’re encouraging anyone who’s doing an open science project and using one of our packages to enter our challenge. If you’re working on any project that could benefit from open data, here’s a chance to get our help in accessing whatever data you need. And hey, if you’re not working on any open science projects, why not dream one up? Winners will get super timely help from us with any and all technical hurdles, free promotion of your project, and some awesome open science swag from figshare. So head on over to our challenge page to see how you can enter. Remember, with open science, we’re all winners."