With a year of preparation and two years of thinking, on September 1st 2024 the Department of Bioinformatics, aka BiGCaT, merged with two other departments to form the Department of Translational Genomics (see also this LinkedIn announcement). This merger creates many new opportunities while it strenghtens our bioinformatics research.
I wish I could say I remember the first citation to one of my research articles. I do not. But I do remember the excitement to see why someone was citing my research. What I do remember is that I got a comment around the same time along the lines of this: “why would anyone cite your article if they can download the results for free?” (about open science cheminformatics research). Other times.
One-and-a-half years ago I started migration my blog from blogger.com to a Markdown and Git-based blog. It has been a fascinating journey that I do not regret.
The last week before the winter break Serious Request took place. We started an action around WikiPathways and we collected 877 euro for the MetaKids Foundation. In total there were 2612 actions, many of which brought in a lot more. We ended up in position 928.
In 2022 I had my first experience with the ISAAC database by the Dutch NWO research funding organization. ISAAC is where you apply for funding and where grants get tracked. As such, research output is recorded in this database.
Linkrot is real and digital preservation problematic. One reason why I have started migrating my blog to a more robust platform. That first step gave me version control. This summer my blog was accepted to Rogue Scholar. That gave me DOIs. And an idea.
Blogs come and go. Sometimes they move from one location to another. However, blogs have not been systematically archived, perhaps for work by efforts by OpenLaboraty.
Every day a child is born with an inherited metabolic disorder, and many do not grow old. MetaKids is a Dutch foundation that collects money and raises awareness and the charity selected this year for the NPO (Dutch national radio/tv) 3FM Serious Request. This has become a Dutch tradition. Serious Request will play music on the radio, when people contributed to the fundraiser, and the more money, the more often the music gets played.
If you are into openscience chemistry or chemistry blogging, then you probably heard of Rich Apodaca’s Depth-First blog. Rich started blogging in 2006 but this is not how I discovered his work originally. I know that we at least already had contact in 2005, because that is when he wrote about an integration between his Octet library and the Chemistry Development Kit in the CDK News (volume 2, issue 2), CDKTools: The CDK-Octet Bridge .
Before we go into the learning bit, let’s just revisit what a version of record is. Wikipedia describes it as “the fully copyedited, typeset and formatted copy of a manuscript as published” (with two references). Basically, in the whole scheme of research output, it is a release . It is a tagged version of the output, allowing people to discuss that version specifically, so that we do not run into endless “oh, but I meant