Introduction

Scientific publishing is undergoing a transition from corporate-controlled, for-profit publishing to more open models. While “Open-Access”, is part of this, there are a number of considerations important in true “Open Publishing”:

1. Free access to the public (who pays for most of the research via their taxes!)
2. Free submission of articles by authors
3. Open Data - where original data and analysis workflows are made public
4. Creative Commons - otherwise known as Copyleft, where rights are retained by the author but the content is usable with attribution
5. Transparency of the review process (with or without anonymity)
6. Open software, standards and tools used in the publication process

This post will focus on item (6) from above. While the choice of software tools is rarely considered as part of the Open Publishing ecosystem, it is of key importance. The economics of publishing are highly dependent on software. Open-source software enables the creation of open journals. This post will be followed-up with some discussion in the frture about how Open Publishing systems can be structured with incentives aligned to the best interests of the progress of science.

Continue reading

Sharing MRI data with colleagues can be a time-consuming exercise. The files are often large and data-sets need to be viewable in a flexible fashion. Rich features assist the communication of results, including:

• 3D viewing
• flexible slicing
• overlay of specific volumes

While there are many software packages for running on the desktop, there’s nothing better than being able to point to a simple HTML link and open the scan data in a prepared format. Therefore, I went digging for an open-source package or library to display MRI renders and slices.

Continue reading