GitHub is the most popular, free online distributed version-control system on the internet (Muniah, 2017). It was firstly written to manage the development of the open-source "mighty" Linux operating system. In big software projects like Linux, it is possible to work with large, geographically distributed teams of coders/developers to work independently with their copies of the code, then it allows track changes with the main code base, merge the changes back into the main code, and reverse them if necessary.
Scientists also use Git and GitHub for storing their data and code, to facilate a laboratory notebook and also share them (Kwok, 2018). GitHub also ensures the find the changes in time, gives a proper social network (issues), a place to collaborate (pull request) and a project management (projects). Users can establish groups, move repositories, make their repositories public or private, which can help other researchers access those repositories and can verify the results or apply them to their own studies.
The main problem with GitHub is, Git itself. Git has a complex command-line interface which is mostly understandable by programmers, it is not for casual users. However, it is also like a bad habit, when you have started using it, you start to love it. And day-by-day you have started to understand the logic under the hood.
SCoG is just a template repository to carry on a remote scientific collaboration on an article/proceeding with GitHub. With SCoG, we may shorten the time needed the planning and using GitHub on a scientific study. For this I started SCoG project on Aug 14th 2020.
If you are here, we accept that you know how to write science (Schimel, 2012). Also you must know how to submit a manuscript to a scholar journal. Here, with SCoG, we want to collaborate on discussing a scientific problem, writing a manuscript, and then with democratic ways, we want to choose a journal to submit it. Therefore, we can divide the total processes in to five main processes:
- Observation and Hypothesis
- Experiments or Calculations
- Analyzes
- Manuscript preparation
- Submission and Review
Please refer to each link for more.
If the total SCoG idea got attention from you and you want to contribute SCoG, how it can work, what is the limiting factors, etc... just continue with the CONTRIBUTING file.
Before contributing to SCoG, it may better read some ideas already mentioned in the internet:
- https://grasshoppermouse.github.io/2019/07/12/should-scientific-publishing-move-to-github-and-friends/
- https://andrewgyork.github.io/
- http://rescience.github.io/
- https://www.arfon.org/chatops-driven-publishing
- https://manubot.org/
- https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-academic-research.html
- https://github.blog/2014-05-14-improving-github-for-science/
- https://www.fastcompany.com/3016677/can-the-github-for-science-convince-researchers-to-open-source-their-data
- https://marciovm.com/i-want-a-github-of-science
- https://scfbm.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1751-0473-8-7
- Kwok, R., 2018. How to pick an electronic laboratory notebook. Nature, 560(7717), pp.269-270.
- Munaiah, N., Kroh, S., Cabrey, C. and Nagappan, M., 2017. Curating github for engineered software projects. Empirical Software Engineering, 22(6), pp.3219-3253.
- Schimel, J. 2012. Writing science: how to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded. Oxford University Press, Oxford.