Democratic Databases: Science on GitHub

[wavingtowaves]

Democratic Databases: Science on GitHub

Study Link: Include the https:// link that brings us to the page of the manuscript
Citation: @doi:10.1038/538127a

Suggested keywords that help identify the relevance of this paper to Ecology and Evolution:

• repository
• GitHub

Which areas of expertise are particularly relevant to the paper?

• ecology and/or evolution;
• biostatistics;
• informatics and computational research;
• [ x ] open science and reproducibility;
• other_replace_with_your_suggestion_or_delete_me.

Summary

Very friendly description of what GitHub is and the main uses and advantages of using it in the natural sciences back in 2016.
At the time of this article, github had "only" 15 million users.
emphasizes that github can democratize a project--through forking, submitting issues, and interacting w/ the project through a github hosted website.
GitHub is easier to interact with for novice users.
Strongly recommends archiving repo snapshots in long-term repositories like figshare/zenodo.

Suggested questions to answer about each paper:

• What is the general main finding or takeaway of the paper?
• What did they analyze and how did they do it?
• What does this paper suggest to improve the issue with reproducibility in science?
• Do you have any concerns about methodology or the interpretation of these results beyond this analysis?

Any comments or notes?