Serious Request: the results

The last week before the winter break Serious Request took place. We started an action around WikiPathways and we collected 877 euro for the MetaKids Foundation. In total there were 2612 actions, many of which brought in a lot more. We ended up in position 928. 4 minute read

ISAAC Chrome Extension

In 2022 I had my first experience with the ISAAC database by the Dutch NWO research funding organization. ISAAC is where you apply for funding and where grants get tracked. As such, research output is recorded in this database. 5 minute read

FAIR blog-to-blog citations

Linkrot is real and digital preservation problematic. One reason why I have started migrating my blog to a more robust platform. That first step gave me version control. This summer my blog was accepted to Rogue Scholar. That gave me DOIs. And an idea. 3 minute read

Archiving blogs

Blogs come and go. Sometimes they move from one location to another. However, blogs have not been systematically archived, perhaps for work by efforts by OpenLaboraty. Bora Zivkovic gave in 2012 a good overview , to which Paul Raeburn replied: “If you weren’t blogging in the mid-2000s, when all the science bloggers knew and blogrolled each other, you’ve already missed the golden age.”. I think blogging is as strong as ever, but a lot of blogs have become more like columns in bigger media. Archiving of blog had not been done systematically, tho some posts made it into print, for example in the Open Laboratory series. Some copies made it into libraries, e.g. 2006, 2010, and 2012. 2 minute read

Serious Request: "WikiPathways in actie voor MetaKids"

Every day a child is born with an inherited metabolic disorder, and many do not grow old. MetaKids is a Dutch foundation that collects money and raises awareness and the charity selected this year for the NPO (Dutch national radio/tv) 3FM Serious Request. This has become a Dutch tradition. Serious Request will play music on the radio, when people contributed to the fundraiser, and the more money, the more often the music gets played. 2 minute read

Richard L. Apodaca

If you are into openscience chemistry or chemistry blogging, then you probably heard of Rich Apodaca’s Depth-First blog. Rich started blogging in 2006 but this is not how I discovered his work originally. I know that we at least already had contact in 2005, because that is when he wrote about an integration between his Octet library and the Chemistry Development Kit in the CDK News (volume 2, issue 2), CDKTools: The CDK-Octet Bridge. In 2006 he reviewed our use of the Open Journal System for CDK News . 2 minute read

Version of record, and what Open Access must learn from Open Science

Before we go into the learning bit, let’s just revisit what a version of record is. Wikipedia describes it as “the fully copyedited, typeset and formatted copy of a manuscript as published” (with two references). Basically, in the whole scheme of research output, it is a release. It is a tagged version of the output, allowing people to discuss that version specifically, so that we do not run into endless “oh, but I meant version manuscript_rewrite_V2_AE_MB_Fixed.docx”. Really, publishing is not unique at all and publishers are doing it wrong. 3 minute read