Rare Juvenile Gray Seal Sighting at VB Oceanfront Captured on Camera A magnificent spectacle took place earlier this week as a rare juvenile gray seal was spotted enjoying the coastal sunshine at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. This enchanting sight was not just a delight for nature lovers and beachgoers but also a reminder of the rich biodiversity that graces our shoreline.

I am making a concerted effort to make grant applications that I have written openly available. We are far too secretive about these, because we don’t like to expose the cases where we “failed” (didn’t get the grant). I am no different to anyone else in this respect - it’s not gratifying to have to unveil that you applied for 50,000 grants and only got 1 of them. But it’s more realistic. So I’ll try to put up some “failures”, too.

I have finally found the time to produce two (extremely dense) abstracts for the next paper (on Source Code and Ludemes).

Handling reported incidents related to a Code of Conduct (CoC) is a complex and delicate task. Managing reports timely and with care is crucial for maintaining a healthy and inclusive community. To assist with this process we’ve developed a template, based on the work of the useR! 2021 CoC Team, designed specifically for analyzing rOpenSci’s CoC incident reports.

Oversight, by Clear Skies, is the first complete index of journal integrity. Oversight takes complex data on research integrity and enables a straightforward and intuitive understanding of every journal in the world. We rank journals based on analysis of data from our extensively field-tested integrity tools.

Next week the InvenioRDM community will meet in Hamburg for five days to discuss the open source repository platform. Front Matter has been part of the InvenioRDM community since August 2021, and Rogue Scholar relaunched on the InvenioRDM platform in October 2024. The last workshop of the InvenioRDM partners took place in March 2024 in Münster, so this is the first meetup where I am running a production instance of InvenioRDM.

What do you think about when you hear the term revolution? Likely, you think of the French Revolution and things like the Storm of the Bastille, the Guillotine or Louis XVI’s execution. It is on the forefront of our minds, because the French Revolution escalated so quickly and so violently that it left a permanent mark on the world.

When our paper on neural canal ridges came out last year (Atterholt et al. 2024), I hoped that it would inspire other people to go peer inside neural canals and discover a lot more of them. My wish was granted, and quickly.

Stan is a probabilistic programming language widely used for Bayesian modelling and inference. While Stan excels at expressing complex statistical models, reading and understanding Stan code involves becoming familiar with the specific way models are written down, creating a barrier to using and contributing to models written in Stan.

Introduction Through Infuze we will build models that simulate individuals’ everyday travel activities and evaluate how well – quickly, comfortably, affordably – existing and newly proposed transport options support those activities. Attending to everyday journeys is undoubtly necessary. But people are not empty economic units.

This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates. What is in this update?