Today, exactly 20 years ago I started this blog. Two years ago I decided to upgrade my blog to one with version control. A decision I am still very excited about. It allowed me to start innovating my blog again. As part of this, and following the step Lars took ealier, I registered my blog with Rogue Scholar and I started migrating blog posts from blogger.com to my new location. I completed the years 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 now.

We've recently completed a major overhaul of our research data archive, datasafe, which is now built on InvenioRDM. Our team at the University of Münster's University and State Library (ULB) has been working to implement this open-source software, tailoring it to meet the specific needs of our researchers. datasafe is designed as a dark archive, where researchers can deposit their datasets for long-term preservation.

7–8 September 2026 | Sheffield, UK & online (co-located with RSECon26) Join a global gathering of leaders and change-makers advancing strategic coordination, sustainability, and collaboration across the research software community. IRSC fosters global cohesion, community connection, and strategic impact to strengthen research software as a vital part of research and innovation.

This is a long post. It started focused on ultrafaint dwarfs, but can’t avoid more general issues. In order to diagnose non-equilibrium effects, we have to have some expectation for what equilibrium would be. The Tully-Fisher relation is a useful empirical touchstone for that. How the Tully-Fisher relation comes about is itself theory-dependent.

von Rieke Paetsch-Saleh „Was machen wir eigentlich mit Holly?“ – „Wir könnten ihn doch einfach verleihen!“ Holly, das ist der inoffizielle Name eines faltbaren Bollerwagens, der seit 2020 als ungeliebtes Büro-Accessoire sein Dasein in der Lebendigen Bibliothek Bottrop fristet.

Open Science (OS) is a movement that aims to bring about a change to the academic publishing system. Yet, despite being around for over 30 years, it has had relatively limited success. Traditional publishers still dominate the landscape, article processing charges have made publishing less equitable and the whole system is straining under the pressure of increased numbers of papers and a reduced reviewer pool.

This is the second of a two-part post about encoding databases as ontologies. In the first part, I gave a background on how I started working on this problem and the software stack I developed along the way. In this post, I explain the philosophy and design about how I encoded the HGNC (HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee) database as an ontology using PyOBO.

This is the first of a two-part post about encoding databases as ontologies. In this post, I give a background on the problems in biocuration that led me to start encoding databases as ontologies, the software I have written to do it, and the repository I have created to store the resulting artifacts in a FAIR, open, and sustainable way.

Artificial intelligence is forcing a reckoning not just in our schools, but in how we solve the world’s most complex problems.  When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness, the immediate fear that rippled through our institutions was singular: the corruption of process.

We want to introduce a new, work-in-progress book on spatial data visualization in R using the tmap package. The current version of the book, titled Spatial Data Visualization with tmap: A Practical Guide to Thematic Mapping in R , is available online at https://tmap.geocompx.org/. This blog post provides an overview of the book, its current status, and how you can get involved in its development.

Our own dev guide states Recognizing the diverse forms of contributions to our mission is very important to us:we like thanking package reviewers and more generally all package contributors, organizations as well as individuals. We have recently extended our efforts to acknowledging the different roles there are when publishing a blog post.