Blog planets: blogging about Debian, GNOME, Wikimedia, FSFE, and many more

I am still an avid user of RSS/Atom feeds. I use Feedly daily, partly because of their easy to use app. My blog is part of Planet RDF, a blog planet. Blog planets aggregate blogs from many people around a certain topic. It’s like a forum, but open, free, community driven. It’s exactly what the web should be. 1 minute read

Archiving and updating my blog

This blog is almost 18 years old now. I have long wanted to migrate it to a version control system and at the same time have more control over things. Markdown would be awesome. In the past year, I learned a lot about the power of Jekyll and needed to get more experienced with it to use it for more databases, like we now do for WikiPathways. 1 minute read

Universities and open infrastructures

The role of a university is manifold. Being a place where people can find knowledge and the track record how that knowledge was reached is often seen as part of that. Over the past decades universities outsources this role, for example to publishers. This is seeing a lot of discussion and I am happy to see that the Dutch Universities are taking back control fast now. For example, Radboud University (>1k followers) already joined the Fediverse (Mastodon etc), making them independent from non-EU law and commercial interests. Scientific journals, Nobel Prize winners, etc already joined too , btw. less than 1 minute read

Journal Rankings

I am pleased to learn that the Dutch Universities start looking at rankings of a more scientific way. It is long overdue that we take scientific peer review of the indicators used in those rankings seriously, instead of hiding beyond fud around the decline of quality of research. 2 minute read

Qeios, an open dissemination platform for research output

A bit over a year ago I got introduced to Qeios when I was asked to review an article by Michie, West, and Hasting: “Creating ontological definitions for use in science” (doi:10.32388/YGIF9B.2). I wrote up my thoughts after reading the paper, and the review was posted openly online and got a DOI. Not the first platform to do this (think F1000), but it is always nice to see some publishers taking publishing seriously. Since then, I reviewed two more papers. 1 minute read

Twitter exits FAIR and is no longer a dissemination solution

And just like that, without a warning, Twitter changed policies again, and you now need a Twitter account and be logged in to see public tweets: Twitter has started blocking unregistered users (The Verge). Though I learned it first via Mastodon, of course. 1 minute read

Community activity #2: FAIRsharing

Some years ago we started the ELIXIR Toxicology Community. It has been an interesting journey, partly covered in this whitepaper). We started with interaction we had in several projects already, but particularly the potential. I see this. This series of posts is a number of things toxicology projects can do to benefit from ELIXIR solutions (“services”). The posts have been sent first to the ELIXIR Toxicology Community mailing list (please join!). 1 minute read