On March 31st, we had the pleasure of learning from guest speaker Joey Lee – masters student of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and Mozilla Science Fellow! http://jk-lee.com/ The aim of his seminar was to discuss first, what we can do to get our research out to a broader audience and also, what is the… Continue reading How can we engage broader audiences in our work? Tips for Effective Science Communication

In our most recent class discussion (March 17, 2016) we had the good fortune to host two guests. Dr. Terry McGlynn, Professor of Biology at Cal State Dominguez Hills (and contributor to the blog http://www.smallpondscience.com) and Dr. Emilio Bruna, Distinguished Teaching Scholar and Professor from the Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation & Center for… Continue reading Data sharing from the researcher’s perspective

Today we got to talk to Titus Brown, former Computer scientist/microbiologists in MSU who moved to UC-Davis, and now working on Data-intensive Biology, on how to determine an authorship. Authorship is becoming more of a issue when it comes to massive collaborative work. Some of the traditional rules followed by most biological/medical journals may not be appropriate… Continue reading 03/03/2016 How to decide authorship on a software paper or massive collaborative projects?

Last Thursday we met with Ariel Rokam to discuss reproducibility in scientific research.  Ariel is a neurobiologist from the University of Washington and a data scientist at the eScience Institute where he collaborates with scientists from various fields working towards promoting research that is reproducible and open. Reproducibility is fundamental to scientific progress and is… Continue reading Reproducibility in science

Every once in a while, PhD students and young researchers may come across the situation of asking for external grey data to continue with our research. This has always been a dilemma and extremely vague to operate without clear rules. As open science researchers we want to make most dataset widely and easily accessible for researcher… Continue reading 02/11/16 Grey data liberation

Andrew suggested looking into google trends data for firefly searches in Michigan as a supplemental data source. So I’m just going to put this here- check it out!

At long last, here is the firefly data. I’ve encouraged the students to take a look, poke around at it, and come to class armed with questions tomorrow. The metadata are a bit thin as an exercise for the students 🙂 These data are a subset of the KBS ladybeetle database  (Our class database is slightly… Continue reading Jan 28th in #OSRRcourse

As we begin our journey into the open world, we must first answer a simple, yet imperative question. How do you decided on the tools or software to use when writing as a group, where each person will contribute independently throughout the various stages of the writing process? In this environment, it’s crucial that each… Continue reading Developing our scientific workflow- collaborative writing

Today, we will be discussing scientific workflows. What tools do you use, and in what order, when you are working on a scientific manuscript? Are there ways we can work better? More reproducibly? More open? Our lesson plan is here. After resolving a few conflicting pull requests (oops!) we now have a working list of… Continue reading Today in #OSRRcourse 1-21