[open-science] the early-career guide to doing open science?

Fri Mar 16 15:40:15 UTC 2012

Greetings Tom,

I understand and empathize with your problem. Although I am in an
institution this isn't a huge amount of help. My own "solution" so far has
been to run my own server (financed by grant money, for sure). But the main
problem is that maintaining this oneself is costly in time and expertise. I
am very lucky in the people I have had in my group. They have implemented,
for example, a Jenkins (Hudson) Continuous integration system (
http://hudson.ch.cam.ac.uk) But, since I have closed down my group its will
inevitably decay.

Universities aren't the best places for this as they are increasingly
predicated on competition. For example in most of my infrastructure I can
get this from the OKF - wikis, etherpads, etc. And there is a group of
volunteers who will help with the technology.

Data is a real, objective problem. I just heard that Tranche (U Mich) is
finding difficulty staying alive. Bioinformatics has huge amounts of public
money and uses it very well. Outside that there is Dryad (but coupled to
publications) and Figshare.

I am not a supporter of Institutional repositories for data. They are
library-oriented and extremely scattered. I favour national libraries (e.g.
the British Library in the UK).

This triggers me to ask whether the OKF might not seek public funding for a
data repository for science, maybe in conjunction with a national library?

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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