- Behind all the technical lingo, what problem does this solve that cannot be solved by sticking to a git repo that tracks your research and using some simple actions on top of GitHub for visualization etc.?by data_maan - 1 week ago
- I'm sure this will be useful for some folks, but I'll stick with 'git' to track changes and 'make' to organize my work.by bluenose69 - 1 week ago
It seems as though this project is a sort of system for creating Makefiles, and that would be great for folks who are unfamiliar with them.
I'm not sure of the audience, though. At least in my research area, there are mainly two groups.
1. People who use latex (and scripting languages) are comfortable with writing Makefiles. 2. People who work in excel (etc) and incorporate results into msword.
Neither group seems a likely candidate for this (admittedly intriguing) software.
- Given the replication crisis in the sciences, objectively this is probably a good thing, but the incumbents in the field would strongly push back against it becoming a norm.by kleton - 1 week ago
- That is actually a very interesting idea. While I am not necessarily interested in some sort of build system for a paper, but being able to figure out which plots need to be regenerated when some data file or some equation is changed is useful. For this, being able to encode the version of the script and all the data files used in creating of the plot would be valuable.by sega_sai - 1 week ago
- Am I not smart, or what about the "Subscribe" page won't allow me to get past the "Name" field? I tried a few combos and even an email addresses and it doesn't validate:by idiotlogical - 1 week ago
- The idea sounds great! However, I see some potential issues. First, IIUC using this tool means that researchers will have to edit their code within it, which may be fine for small edits, but for larger changes, most people would prefer to rely on their favourite IDE. Moreover, if the scripts take a long time to run, this could be problematic and slow down workflows. So, I think this “notebook” could be excellent for projects with a small amount of code, but it may be less suitable for larger projects.by LowkeyPlatypus - 1 week ago
Anyway, it’s a really cool project, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it grows.
- I follow the work of the ink & switch folks... they have a lot of interesting ideas around academic research management and academic publishing.by cashsterling - 1 week ago
I have a day job, but spend a lot of thought about ways to improve academic/technical publishing in the modern era. There are a lot problems with our current academic publishing model: a lot of pay-walled articles / limited public access to research, many articles have no/limited access to the raw data or analytical code, articles don't make use of modern technology to enhance communication (interactive plots, animations, CAD files, video, etc.).
Top level academic journals are trying to raise the bar on research publication standards (partially to avoid the embarrassment of publishing fraudulent research) but they are all stuck not want to kill the golden goose. Academic publishing is a multi-billion dollar affair and making research open, etc. would damage their revenue model.
We need a GitHub for Science... not in the sense of Microsoft owning a publishing platform but in the sense of what GitHub provides for computer science; a platform for public collaboration on code and computer science ideas. We need a federated, open platform for managing experiments and data (i.e. an electronic lab notebook) and communicating research to the public (via code, animations, plots, written text in Typst/LaTeX/Markdown, video, audio, presentations, etc. Ideally this platform would also have an associated discussion forum for discussion and feedback on research.
- Coming from R, I would recommend researchers to have a look at Quarto [1] and packages such as workflowr [2] that also aim to ensure a tight and reproducible pipeline from raw data to the finished paperby karencarits - 1 week ago
[1] https://quarto.org/docs/manuscripts/authoring/rstudio.html