The Week in Review is our weekly roundup of what’s new in open science from the past week. If you have news or announcements you’d like passed on to the community, be sure to share on Twitter with @mozillascience and @billdoesphysics, or join our mailing list and get in touch there.

Conferences & Events

• The International Science 2.0 Conference in Hamburg ran this past week; a couple of highlights from the conference:
  • The OKFN highlighted their proposed Open Definition, to help bring technical and legal clarity to what is meant by ‘openness’ in science.
  • GROBID (site, code), a tool for extracting bibliographic information from PDFs, was well-received by attendees.

• The first World Seabird Twitter Conference presentations have been compiled in a post over at Storify (what’s a ‘Twitter Conference’? Check out their event info here).
• Document Freedom Day was this past Wednesday; more than 50 events worldwide highlighted the value of open standards, and the key role of interoperability in functional openness.
• Right here at the Mozilla Science Lab, we ran our first Ask us Anything forum event on ‘local user groups for coding in research’, co-organized with Noam Ross – check out the thread and our reflections on the event.

Blogs & Papers

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation came out in support of the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research (FASTR) bill, recently reintroduced to the US Congress as discussed on last week’s Week in Review.
• Noam Ross posted a detailed and data driven analysis of what common errors people learning R struggle with (spoiler: an enormous fraction of them boil down to missing information). Ross goes on to consider how these trends can inform an effective strategy for teaching new R users how to read and debug common errors.
• Elizabeth Gilbert wrote an thoughtful description of both value and strategy of open science for junior researchers, both in her field of Social Psychology, and beyond.
• Deep Ganguli published an illustrated journey of his first experiences using R for data manipulation and visualization. An experienced Pythonista, Ganguli reports on the advantages of each language, and the importance of using the right tool for the job.
• Titus Brown got down to brass tacks on exactly why open data is so important, particularly in the context of the biological sciences.
• Sabina Leonelli et al published a thoughtful discussion of practical and systemic ways to implement open science standards in real research.
• Kratz & Strasser released a paper on Researchers Perspectives on Publication & Peer Review of Data (presented as an IPython Notebook), that examines how the research community envisions open data, and discusses how those goals inform the implementation of successful open data strategy.
• Michael Strack began a blog series on his ongoing journey tackling a major data science challenge in his biological research. Strack describes the series as a case study in the importance of not working in isolation, and the value of a supportive and interactive research community.
• Ben Marwick reflected on his recent experiences teaching Software Carpentry to archaeology students in Myanmar.

Government & Policy

• The 5th Annual White House Science Fair ran this past week; in addition to a $240 million dollar commitment to building STEM education in the US, the Office of Science & Technology Policy plans to convene a Citizen Science Forum before the end of this year to examine how to scale and support citizen science efforts.

Open Projects

• Work continues on ScienceToolbox (code), an index of scientific software packages – check out their issues for ways to get involved.
• Arfon Smith pushed a new release of the popular Journal of Brief Ideas.

 

http://mozillascience.org/mozilla-science-lab-week-in-review-march-23-29/