Commentary

Scientific Community Image Forum: A discussion forum for scientific image software

Publishing date: 2019-07-04 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: Channel Editor Summary: In open source software, open code and free software is only the tip of the iceberg. Successful open source projects tend to have strong communities supporting both contributors as well as users - but this often comes with the hidden cost in volunteer (or staff) time and resources.

Low-cost (<€5), open-source, potential alternative to commercial spectrophotometers

Publishing date: 2019-06-12 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: None authors: Vasco Ribeiro Pereira, Bill Stephen Hosker link to paper: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000321 Icons made by catkuro from www.flaticon.com

Bio-On-Magnetic-Beads (BOMB): Open platform for high-throughput nucleic acid extraction and manipulation

Publishing date: 2019-02-01 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: Channel Editor Summary: Open-source, scalable and high-throughput protocols for purifying DNA and RNA using magnetic beads are presented, providing easy to use methods for some of the most common processes in molecular biology.

Enabling precision medicine via standard communication of HTS provenance, analysis, and results

Publishing date: 2019-01-17 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: A personalized approach based on a patient’s or pathogen’s unique genomic sequence is the foundation of precision medicine. Genomic findings must be robust and reproducible, and experimental data capture should adhere to findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) guiding principles.

Spikeling: A low-cost hardware implementation of a spiking neuron for neuroscience teaching and outreach

Publishing date: 2018-11-19 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: Spikeling provides an in silico model of a spiking neuron that can be used to illustrate their biophysical behaviour through sound and light inputs and outputs as well as a custom oscilloscope interface.

Wrangling distributed computing for high-throughput environmental science: An introduction to HTCondor

Publishing date: 2018-10-23 Published on: PLOS Computational Biology summary: Whilst many open source projects enter the spotlight as trend-setting new software packages, it’s nice to appreciate some of the long-lived projects as well.

Haves and have nots must find a better way: The case for open scientific hardware

Publishing date: 2018-09-27 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: Many efforts are making science more open and accessible; they are mostly concentrated on issues that appear before and after experiments are performed: open access journals, open databases, and many other tools to increase reproducibility of science and access to information.

Stop Hiding Your Code

Publishing date: 2018-04-18 Published on: PLOS Blogs Network summary: Difficulties reproducing scientific results are, in the vast majority of cases, not due to the authors having made mistakes or, even worse, forged data, writes Peter Wittek.

Ten simple rules for collaborative lesson development

Publishing date: 2018-03-01 Published on: PLOS Computational Biology summary: Lessons take significant effort to build and even more to maintain. Most academics do this work on their own, but leveraging a community approach can make educational resource development more sustainable, robust, and responsive.

General design procedure for free and open-source hardware for scientific equipment

Publishing date: 2017-12-30 Published on: Designs summary: An open source toolkit for science is useful, but an open source toolkit that follows formal design principles might be even more so - improving interoperability, reproducibility and quality of designs.