s/BiGCaT/Translational Genomics/g

With a year of preparation and two years of thinking, on September 1st 2024 the Department of Bioinformatics, aka BiGCaT, merged with two other departments to form the Department of Translational Genomics (see also this LinkedIn announcement). This merger creates many new opportunities while it strenghtens our bioinformatics research. In fact, I will have more room to focus on the chemical roles in our more accurate understanding of biological processes. I am looking forward to the upcoming years! less than 1 minute read

Niche papers and citation intentions

I wish I could say I remember the first citation to one of my research articles. I do not. But I do remember the excitement to see why someone was citing my research. What I do remember is that I got a comment around the same time along the lines of this: “why would anyone cite your article if they can download the results for free?” (about open science cheminformatics research). Other times. Indeed, I found out there are many reasons why people are citing and not citing articles. The above is one of them (still happens too often). But that’s also an intrinsic property of the current publishing model: some papers get cited too much, others get cited too little. 4 minute read

Blog updates

One-and-a-half years ago I started migration my blog from blogger.com to a Markdown and Git-based blog. It has been a fascinating journey that I do not regret. I love being back in control and not reliant on features of some content management system. I learned so much along the way, including Jekyll and Liquid to start with, but also Fontawesome (for better or worse)m and Goatcounter for GDPR-compatible and privacy-first impact tracking. 1 minute read

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