Rogue Scholar keeps challenging the functionality of my blog

Rogue Scholar continues to offer awesome features. It seems the recent move to InvenioRDM (14.0 was just released) was a good one. It does require rewrites, but make things more scalable. One thing that did exist in the InvenioRDM-based Rogue Scholar last year was citations to blog posts. But even that was redeveloped and relaunched a few days ago. It does not have yet the same amount of citations to blog posts as before, but more than 1200 can be found again. 2 minute read

Scientias, oudheidkunde, en wetenschap, hoe dan

Communication of science is important to me and it comes in many formats. Educational resources, research articles, text books, popular science magazines, blogs, TV shows, podcasts, etc (in no particular order). Somewhere during the pandemic, I started listening to podcasts. I had done that, in the early days, but those early podcasts… well, let’s say, the format had not materialized yet. But also that it can be quite helpful to not play the podcast at the normal speeds, but at, say 1.25x. Podcasts, like any of the above format have a style, an audience in mind. Maybe the audience is first year students, peer in the research field, or the general audience. Or a politician that wants to get credibility. There are several podcasts that I have been listening. Not as education. The may have episode notes, but not proper scientific references. References is one thing important in the communication. Context is another. 11 minute read

Molecular Inorganics: SMILES, MDL molfile v3000, and InChIs

Making chemistry more FAIR requires unique identifiers for chemical structures. For organic compounds plenty of solutions exist that do a great job. Last year and last week, I attended two technical InChI meetings, both with organometallic compounds and other molecular inorganics as one of the key topics. Thanks to Sonja (Mastodon bridge) and Gerd for the invitations. My role includes thinking about what all the work on the InChI means for the Chemistry Development Kit. 3 minute read

Carbon beats gold: Diamond Open Access is the future #2

We need a lot more than diamond open access to really improve the publishing models. That said, but there are examples that diamond open access publishers actually want to improve more just the access to the knowledge dissemination infrastructure. But infrastructure is not only technologies; it also includes the many social aspects that are involved in adoption. And we saw enough of that in the open access transition. 5 minute read

Carbon beats gold: Diamond Open Access is the future #1

Thirty years ago, researchers were struggling getting access to literature they wanted to read. I remember PhD candidates visiting friends at nearby universities for a meetup, and while there, for the copying machine in the remote library. Faster and cheaper than inter-library loaning. Scholarly journals were still printed on paper and distributed to university libraries. That was expensive. Therefore, many libraries provided only access to a subset of journals. 2 minute read

Schema-Driven Interoperability of Biomedical Data Resources for Improved Knowledge Dissemination and Reuse (SchemaInterop)

Today starts a new project. NWO’s Open Science NL awarded Dr Tooba Abbassi-Daloii (Amsterdam UMC) with a grant to work on the interoperability between biomedical databases which all have different scope and design (doi:10.61686/AQNSM35060)). This project will create an open, interoperable framework to connect these databases, enabling efficient access and data use. By applying schema harmonization, aligning database designs, and using open science approaches, it promotes data transparency, reusability, and interoperability. Our approach implements the FAIR principles, ensuring analysis across databases is accurate and transparent, e.g., when combining gene expression data with gene variant knowledge. The project brings together researchers from the Amsterdam UMC, Universiteit Maastricht, and Leiden University Medical Center. less than 1 minute read

The launch of the Virtual Human Platform

Nine days ago, the VHP4Safety project (see these posts) held a launch event in Utrecht for the Virtual Human Platform (VHP), a key result of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA, from the Dutch Nationale Wetenschapsagenda). Despite the name, the NWA is just one part of the NWO funding mechanisms, but like the NWO Open Science programme it is funding with a specific purpose. And the purpose of the NWA is to answer research and societal questions that the Dutch people together defined and a public consultation (many years ago). VHP4Safety is answering to one of those questions. 4 minute read