[open-science] NeuroStars, a Q&A site for neuroscience

[Roman Valls Guimera]

Dear Kaitlin,

We would like to know whether a project that we have been working on is along the lines of what you need for the call for #mozscience.

Briefly, http://neurostars.org is a question and answer site for discussing and sharing knowledge about neuroscience and neuroinformatics that is based on http://biostars.org, a highly successful question and answer site for the Bioinformatics field. 

NeuroStars.org was forked to foster a cultural shift in the biomedical imaging community away from software-specific mailing lists to a more efficient platform for collaborative problem solving like stackoverflow.com (which is not open source), since many of the posts on the software-specific mailing lists were identical in either content or concept.

Currently, Paolo, our Google Summer of Code 2014 student is taking care of pushing new and exciting features to the site:

http://nimiq.github.io/my-summer-of-code/

We pullrequest back to the original author, Istvan Albert, so that the bioinformatics community (among other sci communities) can benefit from our additions:

https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central

Our current broad development goals are to:

1. Provide an RDF integration that is able to cross reference resources within and across sites and neuroinformatics resources such as NIDASH, a scientific provenance standard for bioimaging data.
2. Integrate and expose different dataset sharing protocols such as Bittorrent, git-annex, and iRODS, to simplify data sharing within science.
3. Integrate ORCID, a popular researcher identifier to increase publication awareness among scientists working on related fields.

As you might notice when visiting the site, there’s room for improvement, both UI and backend. We could definitely benefit from good graphics designers and javascript experts, for instance.

At the end of the day, *stars sites are Django apps, so the domain-specificity is rather low, allowing developers to jump in rather quickly. On the other hand we definitely benefit and learn from scientific needs and feedback from experts, on CC and also on GitHub:

https://github.com/INCF/biostar-central/issues/36

I hope it sounds interesting!

Best regards,
Roman