Opening Science - the Book

Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing is a SpringerOpen book (using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license) that will be published in a few weeks. If you can’t wait for the book to be published and/or you want to make comments or suggestions, go to the dynamic book online version at http://book.openingscience.org. I am an author or co-author of three chapters (Reference Management, Altmetrics and Other Novel Measures for Scientific Impact, Unique Identifiers for Researchers) and have helped put the dynamic book together. The book is generated from markdown files hosted in a public Github repo using Jekyll and Pandoc, and we use Prose to enable online editing of the content.

Using markdown, github, jekyll and pandoc is nothing new for blogs, but this is probably one of the first scholarly books using this workflow. The dynamic book is therefore still very much work in progress and feedback is greatly appreciated.

Another great example using a very similar workflow is the upcoming book Advanced R Programming by Hadley Wickham, but he is of course using R and knitr to create most of the markdown. In contrast to Hadley we stored the individual chapters as Jekyll posts rather than pages, as this better integrates with other Jekyll functionality, e.g. tags.