We need a GitHub of Science
marciovm.com
We need a GitHub of Science
1–10 of 68 posts
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#2I tried to start a science network a few years ago, knowble.net, and I know this problem well. The main roadblock we faced was the "publish or perish" mentality. Luckily this mindset seems to be shifting & the idea of a 'GitHub of Science' is very powerful. Much more than a Science LinkedIn, which is what Knowble was.
The main unanswered questions for this idea are 1) Funding & 2) Maintenance. Knowble was a for-profit venture, but should have been a non-profit organization. So where can you/someone get the funding to build & maintain the site?
If you need a python hacker to help out - my email is emile.petrone (at) gmail.com
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#3I agree (http://www.quora.com/What-online-tools-do-scientists-wish-ex...). Why don't we just start using GitHub itself to do this and go from there? The pain points will suggest ways that a real science-focused github could improve on GitHub itself.
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#4>- GitHub's success is not just about openness, but also a prestige economy that rewards valuable content producers with credit and attention
I don't think I can agree with that. GitHub's success, IMO, seems to be based almost entirely on its openness. It has turned contributing to open source software into a drop-dead easy task, which would never be found nor contributed to if they weren't open. And they keep making it easier. I've fixed a number of things with machines which don't have Git installed, simply because they have their on-site editor.
Imagine if GitHub were behind a paywall. Do you think it would still be the success it is today? And, I may be weird, but I very rarely look at the names associated with commit histories. The code should speak for itself.
The rest of it sounds about right, scientific publishing as a whole is massively backwards compared to GitHub, if you're looking at it from an "Open" perspective. But I think that a lot of that is that the researchers tend to be insular compared to the implementers (businesses guarding their IP aside - they're not really GitHub's target audience anyway). GitHub isn't used exclusively for comp-sci researchers to post their findings with code, it's more for people doing things with ideas others have contributed to.
There are experiments on GitHub, absolutely. I have a few myself. But the main thing that GitHub has done is to make final products easy to find, modify, and contribute to. I have significant doubts that it would fit a research workflow smoothly, without becoming something else entirely.
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#5[deleted]
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#6Half of Github's success is because Git was so successful and easy to use. People started using Git first, and then Github came along and made things more social.
There is no fundamental equivalent to Git in basic science or engineering research. Until you have something that is relatively popular and makes collaboration relatively easy to use, it will be difficult to have a "GitHub of Science".
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#7> - GitHub's success is not just about openness, but also a prestige economy that rewards valuable content producers with credit and attention I don't think I can agree with that. GitHub's success, IMO, seems to be based almost entirely on its openness. It has turned contributing to open source software into a drop-dead easy task, which would never be found nor contributed to if they weren't open. And they keep makin…
John Resig started a project to generate resumes from the contributions at github. Regularly I see posts at HN/reddit/etc sites of users saying: "I build this and that, check it out!".
Personally, a motivation (of a lot more motivations) is indeed prestige. Now I can show off my nice work.
Sure, openness started it all: Linus shared his VCS, which in turn sparked Github, which in turn initiated thousands of developers to share their code. But openness really isn't the sole driver for people to share their code any more; more incentives, of which prestige is an important one, drive the popularity of github.
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#8I agree ( http://www.quora.com/What-online-tools-do-scientists-wish-ex... ). Why don't we just start using GitHub itself to do this and go from there? The pain points will suggest ways that a real science-focused github could improve on GitHub itself.
The problem is currently GUI. There are no good GUI's to work with git. Windows and Mac OS X have some GUI tools scratching the surface of what's possible with git, but none come close in opening up the full possibilities of git. Linux has a few very alpha, specific (like showing branches) GUI tools.
If we want non-programmers to use git, we need GUI's to instantly visualize the state, commands and other possibilities. No non-programmer is going to learn git using a CLI.
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#9> - GitHub's success is not just about openness, but also a prestige economy that rewards valuable content producers with credit and attention I don't think I can agree with that. GitHub's success, IMO, seems to be based almost entirely on its openness. It has turned contributing to open source software into a drop-dead easy task, which would never be found nor contributed to if they weren't open. And they keep makin…
John Resig started a project to generate resumes from the contributions at github. Regularly I see posts at HN/reddit/etc sites of users saying: "I build this and that, check it out!". Personally, a motivation (of a lot more motivations) is indeed prestige. Now I can show off my nice work. Sure, openness started it all: Linus shared his VCS, which in turn sparked Github, which in turn initiated thousands of developer…
>"I build this and that, check it out!"
But people do that with other open source sites as well. Does GitHub provide this feature better than SourceForge or others? You still need to go to the user's page, they don't advertise it anywhere else. Do people go to GitHub to see information about person X, or project Y? And for the posts on social sites, are they more often about the creator or what they created?
Re: We need a GitHub of Science
#10I believe it represents a demonstrably superior way of distributing validated knowledge than academic publishing.
This is where he goes wrong. As he demonstrates up to that point, the purpose of publishing in the academia is not to "distribute knowledge" but to gain academic points.
And academic citation is not the same as copying code. Academic physicists routinely cite papers without reading them. The reason is that academic physicists cite like lawyers; to establish and assert precedence. So I would add "legal" citation to "prestige" and "popular" type citations. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1012/1012.4871.pdf