Meet Mozilla’s Latest Open Science Awardees
Today, we’re announcing our latest Mozilla Science Mini Grant awardees: eight projects from six different countries that merge open-source values with scientific research.
Among the projects receiving funds: a community-owned publishing platform for research. A three-day hackathon for scientists in the life sciences, and open-source protocols for analyzing the yeast DNA in beer.
These grants are part of Mozilla’s larger Fellowships and Awards work. They are made possible by The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.
Meet the eight latest grantees:
Project: Octopus
Lead: Alexandra Freeman (Twitter: @alex_freeman/ GitHub: https://github.com/octopus-hypothesis)
Location: United Kingdom
Description: The idea behind Octopus is to develop a community-owned scientific publishing platform that is freely open and language agnostic. Researchers can publish and review work in increments smaller than a whole paper through categories of publication, such as a protocol or statistical analysis of data. This project was initiated at the eLife/Mozilla sprint in mid-2018 and this award is to support creation of a minimally viable skeleton of the platform.
Learn more and get involved: Website: http://www.sciencepublishing.online/ / GitHub: https://github.com/octopus-hypothesis
Project: Street Science Community
Lead: Bérénice Batut (GitHub: @StreetScienceCommunity)
Location: Germany
Description: Street Science Community will be developing the BeerDEcoded project to establish protocols for extracting, sequencing and analyzing yeast DNA from bottled beers in an accessible simplified fashion. These protocols will be used to organize workshops in which students and other individuals come into contact with molecular biology, data analysis, and open science by extracting, sequencing and analyzing the “DNA of beer,” more specifically brewing yeast.
Learn more and get involved: Website: https://streetscience.community/ / Gitter: https://gitter.im/usegalaxy-eu/streetscience
Project: IGNITE — Biomedical Camp
Lead: Gracielle Higino & Maria Bonatelli (Twitter: @graciellehigino & @marialbona)
Location: Brazil
Description: IGNITE — Biomedical Camp is a program to train biomedical scientists that work in underdeveloped cities in South America on how to communicate with non-specialists about health and biotechnology. Deliverables will include three training modules on science communication as well as a three-day training in São Paulo, Brazil.
Learn more and get involved: Website: http://ignitescicomm.com/ / GitHub: https://github.com/graciellehigino/IGNITE
Project: Reproducibility4everyone
Organization: eLife Sciences Publications Ltd
Lead: Magdalena Julkowska, April Clyburne-Sherin, and Benjamin Schwessinger (Twitter: @repro4everyone)
Location: Saudi Arabia
Description: With additional support from Code Ocean, Addgene, protocols.io and the eLife Ambassadors program, Reproducibility4everyone works toward improving rigor and reproducibility within the scientific community with in-person workshops and easily accessible online resources. Workshops will be held at four international conferences. A website will serve as a hub for workshop resources and will include videos of workshop modules, as well as other resources, lists, and links.
Learn more and get involved: Email: repro4everyone@gmail.com / GitHub repository: https://orthogonal-research-lab.github.io/reproducibility-website/
Project: Counter Culture Labs Open Science Outreach
Organization: Counter Culture Labs
Lead: Ramy Kim (Twitter: @ramymik; @CountrCultrLabs)
Location: United States
Description: Counter Culture Labs (CCL) will work with a local school and the Lawrence Hall of Science to develop an open science outreach and education pilot program. Monthly workshops will be held for students at their schools and at open lab sessions in the lab. A mobile “biohacking” lab will be set up that can shuttle between workshop locations.
Project: LifeSci Hack
Organization: Experimental Civics LLC
Lead: Sarah Sharif, Suliman Sharif, & Scott Collins (Twitter: @Exp_Civics / GitHub: https://github.com/LifeSciHack/LifeSciHack2019)
Location: United States
Description: Building on the success of previous hackathons, LifeSciHack will host a three-day hackathon in Austin, Texas where scientists and technologists can gather together, discuss, and implement solutions on challenges faced by the life science community. The top five projects from the hackathon will receive prize money and continued support to get projects to a demonstration phase with a clear roadmap for development.
Learn more and get involved: Website:http://lifescihack.com/ / Github: https://github.com/LifeSciHack/
Project: Bridging communities toward open training materials for life sciences
Organization: Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam
Lead: Saskia Hiltemann and Bérénice Batut (Gitter: https://gitter.im/galaxy-carpentries)
Location: Netherlands
Description: This project will focus on adaptation and delivery of existing training materials from various open communities for High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) data analysis skills needed in genomics research. Collaboration on material adaptation will take place through sprints, and delivery of training will be done at two 3-day workshops. Project done in collaboration with Galaxy and Carpentries.
Learn more and get involved: Website: https://galaxy-carpentries.github.io/gallantries/ /
Project: CODE CHECK: A web service for independent reproduction of computations underlying biomedical research
Organization: University of Cambridge
Lead: Stephen Eglen and Daniel Nüst (Twitter: @StephenEglen & @nordholmen)
Location: United Kingdom
Description: The project team will build and evaluate the feasibility of CODE CHECK for the certification of computations underlying published research articles in computational neuroscience. They will prototype a system that awards CODE CHECK badges to specific executions of open notebooks on Binder, allowing long-term access and scrutiny of open research by reviewers and readers.
Learn more and get involved: Website: http://www.codecheck.org.uk
The pool of applicants from which these winners were selected blew us away with their passion and innovation for open science. Thank you to all of you who applied! If you didn’t receive a grant this round, please don’t let it stop you from applying for the next round, to be announced soon. Join us in congratulating these grantees and please do reach out to the project leads if you are interested in supporting these projects further.
