Abby Tabor
This week, a host of high-tech solutions allowed the MyScienceWork editorial team to write, translate, scour the web for data, crunch numbers, bang heads on tables when files were lost, and bring the news to you. BEHOLD!
Audrey’s ingenious community management post-tracking system:
Pierre-Sofiane’s next-generation, data-column-hidey Post-It tool:
He’s working on a bit of data journalism at the moment – stay tuned!!
And Abby’s external brain:
What? I need to see stuff.
These impressive solutions allowed us to bring you:
A review of open access articles available on MyScienceWork that answer the question:
Why do we need to protect kids from the sun?
Some of the answers may surprise you.
Thanks to our friends at ISGTW, we learned about an OA initiative in Africa that has already spawned 25 fully functional open repositories:
Open access in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania — making research more relevant to the world
We met (or met again) Stéphanie Longet, an immunology/music fan working in fundamental research, in this week’s episode of KKD:
Knock Knock Doc – Episode 07 # Season 1: Passion Cocktail
And for our francophone readers, we translated David Davila’s confession about the wondrous, yet unsettling, abilities of the octopus. Here it is again in English:
The Science Behind Cthulhu: Why Octopi Are Terrifying yet Awesome
And, finally, a topic beyond the confines of our open space this week that caught our interest:
Alternative science metrics are trending on Twitter, albeit in a not-entirely-serious way. The trigger was a mock study published in Genome Biology, suggesting the creation of the “Kardashian Index” to measure researchers’ scientific contribution against their celebrity, defined in terms of number of Twitter followers.
In response, scientists let loose, proposing their own #AlternativeScienceMetrics. See this Storify for more.
Wow, I spawned a hashtag, I should retire ... It's all downhill from here #AlternateScienceMetrics
— Neil Hall (@neilhall_uk) July 30, 2014
However, it also rubbed many people the wrong way. Anthropologist Kate Clancy felt the joke was “punching down”, going after those with the least power to change research metrics:
In an interesting discussion on microBEnet, some commented that the “K-Index” joke was seriously unhelpful regarding the way scientific outreach is viewed:
