2014 beacon-tools-for-science

Free and Easy to Use Tools to Make Your Research, Data, and Code More Accessible

Titus Brownctb@msu.edu

Maintaining academic Internet presence

Goals:• Easy to find correct, up to date information.• Some evidence that you are an articulate

human being is not usually a bad idea.– Grad school application essay;– Post-doc statement of purpose;– Faculty research statement;

…make sure everything has dates on it,somewhere obvious.

What do you get when you google yourself?

Web sites are great, but hard to maintain…

Maintaining academic Internet presence

Goals:• Easy to find correct, up to date information.• Some evidence that you are an articulate

human being is not usually a bad idea.– Grad school application essay;– Post-doc statement of purpose;– Faculty research statement;

…make sure everything has dates on it,somewhere obvious.

Google Scholar!

Automatically updated lists of your publications and online materials.

• Totally awesome.• Completely free.• The first place I go to find someone’s papers &

evaluate their “impact.”

• Also: good scholarly literature search; personal library; suggestion/recommendation engine.

Google Scholar automatically finds accessible versions of your papers

…also has a “library” feature, for maintaining paper collections.

…and a “recommender” system…

TODO: Google Scholar

• Go “claim” (enable) your profile.

• Make sure that all of your papers are accessible through Google Scholar.

• Look at the library, recommender, and alerts features.

Note: provide link in your CV!

Figshare

Figshare is a repository for digital objects that provides citation handles for them.

• A place to dump “digital objects” and receive DOIs for them.

• Somewhat surprisingly, the consensus location for data sets w/no other home.

…I put my blog posts here.

TODO: figshare

• Go create an account; upload anything you want to share in a citable manner (papers, blog posts, posters, figures, data sets).

• Hint, NSF asks for your data products on your BioSketch…

• Note: there are default limits on data set size for upload, but they can be waived easily.

• Note: Code is a special issue, with integration w/github now a possibility.

GitHub

• A place to collaboratively work on code (openly or not).

• N.B. Avida and khmer are both on github.

Issue tracking, merge requests, etc.

TODO: github

• If you are a programmer, create a (free) account.http://github.com/ctb/

• Free private repos for academics are available, too.

• If you are in a lab with lots of other programmers, think about creating a (free) organization.http://github.com/ged-lab/

• Put some code there, maybe?

Note: github.com/beacon-center/

ImpactStory

Slideshare

Thanks!

Any questions?

Note: this presentation is on slideshare