Tag: openness

Open Ephys

Open Ephys is a well-developed, extensive open hardware solution for extracellular electrophysiology.

Founded by Josh Siegle and Jakob Voigts, its motivation resonantes with Labrigger:

We are not motivated to create new tools for their own sake,…



Smartport for open source handheld laser control

Wicked Lasers makes laser pointers. High quality, high power laser pointers that can be repurposed for other applications. In fact, some of their lasers should probably never be used as pointers (e.g., this 2 watt 445…



OpenSPIM and OpenSpinMicroscopy for light sheet microscopy

This month, Nature Methods highlights a couple of open light sheet microscopy projects.

First up is …



figshare is taking off

Figshare is an online database for storing figures, data, and papers. It’s been around for a while, but recently its really been taking off.

–You can post images, or entire paper PDFs. Also datasets.

–It’s citable. Useful…



Post publication peer review

Post publication peer review has yet to really take off, but Labrigger hopes it does. One of the newest sites is PubPeer.

PubPeer does it right, allowing for anonymity. This is important in order to obtain…



Interview with the developers of HelioScan

Last Monday, Labrigger covered HelioScan, a LabVIEW-based, two-photon laser scanning microscopy software suite.

Marcel van ‘t Hoff (left) and Dominik…



SOFA, open stats

If you’d like to read some deep, wide-ranging philosophical discussions about R, an open statistics software package, then I wonder why we’re friends. But since we are, here are some links, you psychopath:
“R is a programming language missing a GUI”



New open access journal: get paid to review

Springer is starting a new open access journal called “Scio Cell Biology”. It’s intended to be the first of what they hope will be a whole family of “Scio”-branded journals. They’re a gold open access/libre



Nature article on releasing source code

Nature just published a 4-page perspective article on the important of releasing the source code for programs used in scientific research. The authors emphasize the importance of reproducibility for results that depend…



The Elsevier Boycott and the Research Works Act

Perhaps you’ve heard about the Elsevier Boycott aka the Cost of Knowledge. I’m not going to rehash the problem we all know so well. But here are a few links I wanted to share. Just…



Predatory open science funding

There are some open access journals that seem to have relativley loose editorial standards. And by “editorial” I mean “ethical”, and by “relatively loose”, I mean “no”. These publishers have been called “predatory” open access…



3D Sketch-up models for Newport parts

Thorlabs and Newport have offered 3D models of their products for a long time. However, they’re typically in formats for expensive programs like SolidWorks and AutoCAD. In the past year or two, Newport has been slowly adding to their library of Google SketchUp models.



Use ScanImage? Support it. It’s free.

ScanImage is an excellent software package for controlling 2p scopes. It’s free and open source. It’s been actively developed and released to the…



Tycho Brahe

Like the Mayan astronomers over 600 years before him, Tycho Brahe was a data factory. A data factory in the same vein as the …



Streamlined & simple prototyping to custom PCB

Fritzing is PCB design software (EDA) in the spirit of Arduino and Processing. It’s open source, cross-platform, streamlined, and simple to use. It doesn’t do simulations, but you can lay out your circuit in a GUI that looks like a prototyping board, then move…