I am excited to share that the Digital Research Academy incorporation is almost done. We had our notary appointment last week, set up the bank account and are now waiting for the official registration of the DRA Digital Research Academy GmbH.

I am in the process of making my newsletter FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Here's how.

I am an advocate for Open Science. The FAIR priciples are very near and dear to my heart. I was excited when the Open Science folks at Jülich archived a bunch of my posts and gave them a persistent identifier (DOI). This exactly what I was still missing to make my posts more FAIR.

I get asked for career advice all the time (even though I am just figuring stuff out myself). Generally I try to help by listening and asking questions, but there is one thing that I tell everyone who wants to hear it: pick work where you like the people.

The academic publishing system is broken. I think we can all agree on that. But what if you want to have an academic career and at the same time stick to your values of openness? Here's my pragmatic take.

The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now since the subscription access journal Heterocycles (e-ISSN: 1881-0942) was taken offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a “key” journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been cited at least 164,000 times. The journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.

The Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) database is an invaluable resource that supports the unambiguous identification of researchers. However, its first party data dump is too complex, verbose, and unstandardized for many use cases. This post describes open source software I wrote that automates downloading, processing, and exporting ORCID into a more usable form. I put the results on Zenodo under the CC0 license.

Have you complained about the inefficiency of public administration before? I think, you're not alone. In this post I want to share my journey with trying to help increase efficiency through data literacy in the public sector.

Students and early PhD candidates often don't understand all the talk about Open Science. They think Open Science is just 'normal' science. The older researchers are the ones who teach them otherwise. Let's change that!

Spaces where you can gather with like minded people to discuss, learn, and collaborate can be really powerful. Could a space like this exist for Open Science?