1. Free and Easy to Use Tools to Make
Your Research, Data, and Code More
Accessible
Titus Brown
ctb@msu.edu

2. Maintaining academic Internet
presence
Goals:
• Easy to find correct, up to date information.
• Some evidence that you are an articulate
human being is not usually a bad idea.
– Grad school application essay;
– Post-doc statement of purpose;
– Faculty research statement;
…make sure everything has dates on it,
somewhere obvious.

3. What do you get when you google
yourself?

4. Web sites are great, but hard to
maintain…

5. Maintaining academic Internet
presence
Goals:
• Easy to find correct, up to date information.
• Some evidence that you are an articulate
human being is not usually a bad idea.
– Grad school application essay;
– Post-doc statement of purpose;
– Faculty research statement;
…make sure everything has dates on it,
somewhere obvious.

6. Google Scholar!
Automatically updated lists of your publications
and online materials.
• Totally awesome.
• Completely free.
• The first place I go to find someone’s papers &
evaluate their “impact.”
• Also: good scholarly literature search; personal
library; suggestion/recommendation engine.

9. Google Scholar automatically finds
accessible versions of your papers

10. …also has a “library” feature, for
maintaining paper collections.

11. …and a “recommender” system…

12. TODO: Google Scholar
• Go “claim” (enable) your profile.
• Make sure that all of your papers are
accessible through Google Scholar.
• Look at the library, recommender, and alerts
features.

13. Note: provide link in your CV!

14. Figshare
Figshare is a repository for digital objects that
provides citation handles for them.
• A place to dump “digital objects” and receive
DOIs for them.
• Somewhat surprisingly, the consensus location
for data sets w/no other home.

15. …I put my blog posts here.

17. TODO: figshare
• Go create an account; upload anything you want to share in
a citable manner (papers, blog posts, posters, figures, data
sets).
• Hint, NSF asks for your data products on your BioSketch…
• Note: there are default limits on data set size for
upload, but they can be waived easily.
• Note: Code is a special issue, with integration w/github now
a possibility.

18. GitHub
• A place to collaboratively work on code
(openly or not).
• N.B. Avida and khmer are both on github.

20. Issue tracking, merge requests, etc.

21. TODO: github
• If you are a programmer, create a (free) account.
http://github.com/ctb/
• Free private repos for academics are available, too.
• If you are in a lab with lots of other programmers, think
about creating a (free) organization.
http://github.com/ged-lab/
• Put some code there, maybe?
Note: github.com/beacon-center/

22. ImpactStory

23. Slideshare

24. Thanks!
Any questions?
Note: this presentation is on slideshare 