Monday, March 17, 2014

GitHub Education Officially Providing Students and Educators Free Resources

In my last post I talked about PLOS's efforts to improve data sharing, and how important it is to make your data and analyses tools available when you publish, especially in microbiome research.  This importance of sharing published data and analysis scripts was also highlighted in a recent article in the journal Microbiome (see reference below).  Now the code versioning and sharing software site GitHub is even getting on board by officially supporting students and classrooms with free micro and organization accounts to improve coding education and data sharing practices.  I'll also note that, as they point out in their blog, this is something they had done for a while but now they made it official.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

New PLOS Publishing Requirements Aim to Advance Data Sharing Practices

PLOS (the Public Library Of Science) is a popular scientific journal publisher whose journals include PLOS Genetics, PLOS Pathogens, and of course, PLOS ONE.  What makes PLOS stand out is not that they publish great science (which they do, of course), but rather their leadership in open access publishing (open access means that anybody can read their publications for free).  Recently PLOS announced that they will be taking their open access policies to the next level by requiring all published data to be openly and clearly accessible to the public.  Specifically their blog stated that "authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article".  This has already sparked some important conversations about the feasibility of such a requirement.