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. I love being back in control and not reliant on features of some content management system. I learned so much along the way, including Jekyll and Liquid to start with, but also Fontawesome (for better or worse)m and Goatcounter for GDPR-compatible and privacy-first impact tracking.

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.

Jerven Bolleman et al. recently published a great preprint about how to use RDF to give SPARQL queries context by linking it (semantically) with metadata. The context includes keywords, the SPARQL endpoint the query can be run against, and a human-oriented description of the query.

The x-odus continues and there is a wave of researchers moving from X to another walled-garden called Bluesky. This is good and bad. First, it is good that people are leaving X (imho) and it is good that they move to a platform that supports open standards, the AT Protocol. But I am less sure, about moving to another closed source platform. I prefer Mastodon.

Open Science doesn’t make publishing easier. That that’s all for the better: our research efforts are complex, so why should the publishing be. Sure, I am not talking about references formatting or moving the Methods section to the right location, or some silly statement that all authors agree with the manuscript when you are the only author.