Want to embrace open data but don’t know where to start? The tools are out there, says Matthew Edmonds.
The Publishing Better Science through Better Data conference, or #scidata16 for short, took place at the Wellcome Collection in London at the end of October. This one-day event organised by the journal Scientific Data, Springer Nature and the Wellcome Trust explored the challenges facing early-career researchers as we enter the era of open data.
As a data novice, I arrived without really knowing what to expect. The types of experiments I perform generate only small datasets needing a simple statistical test, easily summarised in a graph in the manuscript. The original data can be safely left to gather dust in a shared drive. Continue reading →
Our reporter Monya Baker runs through some of the statistical tools she found when writing her latest story.
As I reported in a Nature feature published this week, I found more online courses that were being developed than were actually in place. Resources to help scientists do more robust research are set to expand quickly. For example, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences has a competitive program that awards funds to institutions to enhance graduate student training; of 15 such supplements awarded in 2015, a dozen involved data analysis, statistics, or experimental rigor. You can find more here, and that is only a fraction of what is available. Some courses are still being developed and piloted to select students; others are being offered only to those in a particular department or training grant. If you find one that interests you, it can’t hurt to ask.
Guest Post by Martin Fenner.
Martin Fenner is the technical lead for the PLOS Article-Level Metrics project. Before taking this position in 2012 he worked as a medical oncologist at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany. He has served on the ORCID Board from 2010 to 2012 and is a member of the ORCID Outreach Steering Group.
This year’s SpotOn London conference takes place November 14-15 and registration opened this Monday. I have been helping to organize this conference since 2009, and I again look forward to the sessions, and – more importantly – the discussions with people in and between sessions this year.
The name (ScienceBlogging London, ScienceOnline London, SpotOn London), the location (Royal Institution, British Library, Wellcome Conference Center), the people organizing (too many to mention, but Nature Publishing Group always at the core), and the fringe events (lots of cool things from science tours toStory Collider) and the format have always changed slightly over the years, and this year again is a bit different. The biggest change is obviously that Lou Woodley is no longer an organizer (as she announced at last year’s conference), but this is also the first SpotOn conference with a theme:
The challenges of balancing the public and the private in the digital age
This is obviously a very broad topic, but nicely encompasses many important issues that we are dealing with in scholarly communication today. The draft program is posted here, and I’m helping organize the sessions on sharing sensitive data and open peer review. More details will follow for all these sessions.
