Gen R Blog Archives – Generation R

Redistributing the Future: An Interview with MOVING MOOC Makers Sabine Barthold and Franziska Günther

MOVING MOOC on January 18, 2019

Cite as: DOI:10.25815/J661-FK24

Citation format: The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

Barthold, S., & Günther, F. Redistributing the Future: An Interview with MOVING MOOC Makers Sabine Barthold and Franziska Günther. Generation R. https://doi.org/10.25815/J661-FK24.

Sabine and Franziska explore how they see MOVING MOOC, alongside other open science initiatives, as contributing to closing the research skills gap between what open science has on offer for the future of research and what is being delivered for students and young researchers in universities now — with the aim to providing a ‘safe space’ to up their open collaborative science skills. To use William Gibson’s much used adage “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed”.

Making a ‘Pre-Publishing’ Research Workflow Open Source

Gen R on December 14, 2018

Socializing Infrastructures

Being open & transparent saves time & improves research

Image: Before – After. ‘Being open & transparent saves time & improves research: The Grackle Project’ and ‘Making a ‘Pre-Publishing’ Research Workflow Open Source’ modification of slide 25 from keynote presentation from the 13th Munin Conference (Tromsø, Norway) by Dr. Corina Logan, “We won’t be… ‘Bullied into Bad Science'”, 28.11.2018, https://osf.io/sy9f7/ | See section ‘Failing to make the complete workflow Open Source’ for annotations

At the Munin conference on scholarly publishing in Norway at the end of November (2018) Dr. Corina Logan presented a keynote “We won’t be… ‘Bullied into Bad Science'”. While following on the livestream GenR offered, as an experiment, to convert Dr. Logan’s ‘pre-publishing’ workflow to use only Open Source tools. As a collaborative open-work using Cryptpad we have been able to replace ‘most’ tools and for the exceptions chart a way to make a totally Free and Open Source Software workflow. In this short experiment, once again a
recurring issue has been encountered, that the basic provision of an infrastructural pillar of ‘modern research literacy’ has been overlooked—namely Open Source software—in this case the provision of ‘simple tools for authoring’. This is only the start of the work and your invited to chip in on the pad — EDITME!.

Illuminating Dark Knowledge

Peter Kraker on December 3, 2018

How innovation in search engines needs renewing with
open working and open indexes

Image: LA at Night, Wikimedia, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/LA_at_night.jpg

Socializing Infrastructures

Without being able to build on top of existing — search tools and indexes — innovation in search engines is being held back and letting down researchers and the public. The Open Access and Open Science movement that have worked hard to make free hundreds of thousands of publications, but at the last mile search engines are failing to effectively deliver on discovery. Public knowledge is hidden in plain sight — a phenomenon called “Dark Knowledge”. This article is a call for open infrastructural ‘ways of working’ to be adopted as ‘the new normal’ to turn this situation around in software and interface development for scholarly search.

An Interview with de-RSE: Supporting Researchers Using Software

Gen R on November 23, 2018

Image: de-RSE https://www.de-rse.org/de/index.html

Socializing Infrastructures

de-RSE – Research Science Engineers: A New Association in Germany

An interview by GenR with members of the newly forming German association of Research Software Engineers – de-RSE. The association is being formally constituted in late November 2018 (next week 26th Nov., Berlin) and will provide a new support network for the wider software community. Highlights being a summer 2019 conference in Potsdam, and a fellowship programme. The interview is the first in a series of article in GenR’s theme ‘Socializing Infrastructures‘ and we take the opportunity to ask de-RSE for their comments on Open Science infrastructures and ‘software as infrastructure’.

Research or Perish! The Decentralized Web and Open Research. A Report from the FORCE11 2018 Montreal Conference

Simon Worthington on November 12, 2018

Image: FORCE11 2018 Montreal Conference, group photo

Decentralized Web

I attended the FORCE11 annual conference—an event with a very broad coverage of scholarly communications—with a mission in mind. This mission was to see what decentralized web (DWeb) research projects had matured to a level to be reusable in the working context of a scholars. Most DWeb systems and services are in an alpha phase, so in early R&D state where things are still experimental and not meant for large scale professional use. When a systems is in an alpha phase the objective is to carry out R&D to be able to test a set of assumptions and so improve a system to be able for it to move onto become a beta system, and then a full release. My very real concern is that almost all DWeb systems being proposed don’t know enough about how scholars and academia works, and instead use very thin models of scholarly workflows, that in turn means the chances of adoption, moving through the development phases, or solving the big problems in science communications are greatly reduced.