The next installment from the Portal Blog by my student Joan Meiners (@beecycles) on how we shook things up at the Portal Project so we could study regime shifts.

At various meetings I get often asked by early career researchers, librarians or other colleagues what my interactions with publishers felt like. I usually answer that my last twelve years campaigning for infrastructure reform felt like academia was receiving the big middle finger from publishers: No matter what you try, academia, we’ll still get your money, stupid suckers!

At seemingly every possibility in a discussion on peer-review, people apparently feel the need to emphasize that in the current model reviewers (or most academic editors handling peer-review) are not being paid.

I received an invitation to SciFoo (a “Science F riends o f O ‘Reilly” meeting) in the beginning of April this year. I was aware of the hype around this “unconference” and several people I knew had already participated, so at first I was rather excited and flattered about the invitation. However, I was in Germany, the meeting was at Google headquarters in Palo Alto, California and the flight was not covered.

Building an open, community-supported, e-infrastructure for medical metabolomics data. The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme is funding the PhenoMeNal (Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis) project that aims to support data processing and analysis pipelines for molecular phenotype data generated from metabolomics applications.

From how we do science to publishing practices to the sociology of science, there isn’t an aspect of the scientific endeavor that isn’t in flux right now.

At Disney World infancy ends at 3, or at least that is the age children have to start purchasing tickets. It seemed appropriate to celebrate our 4th birthday there. Or at least at the #ISMB16 Computational Biology meeting that was held this week at the Walt Disney World Resort.

The first, throat clearing post to kick off what (we hope) will be a revitalization of the Portal Project Blog

[Update: A little bird pointed out I didn’t have a link to the actual Portal blog. That has been remedied along with a link to the Portal Project website for those who’d like more info on the project] A couple weeks ago, I posted about the new data paper from my long-term field site, the Portal Project.

Join the Open Data club. Every year we catch up with fellow enthusiasts of open data, open source and open science at BOSC, the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference that is a Special Interest Group of the ISCB’s annual ISMB conference. This year there is an interesting juxtaposition with the location, being held at the Disney World resort in Orlando.