Intros and kickoff thread for ATProto x Science

ATProto Science
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Hello everyone, excited to kickoff this space together with @tgoerke.bsky.social @bmann.ca !

ATProto has huge potential for supporting new ways of doing research, and this space is intended to help catalyze the discussions that will get us there!

A little about me - I’m Ronen, a research-preneur and co-founder of Cosmik with @wesleyfinck.org& Shahar . We’re working on moving research beyond pdfs to more modular, participatory and social mediums that better harness and enhance collective intelligence. We’re developing Semble.so, a social knowledge network (think Are.na / Goodreads for research)

Feel free to intro yourself here and share any ATProto x science projects or ideas! :grinning_face:

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Excellent! Thanks for setting up this space. PiPup is a new atproto app for long-form writing that folks in STEM might find very helpful. I designed it to support math, function plots, and diagrams to make science communication easier and more engaging. I’d love to hear how we can help researchers connect with audiences across social media.

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Hi, little intro from me as well. My name is Torsten. I am a researcher at CODIP, TUD and part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the social sciences, psychology and education. My focus as CS researcher is on methods for data-driven empirical research. I am interested in new learning cultures and participatory learning spaces emerging in the digital transformation. In my research I combine plurality research, knowledge graphs, tokenized namespaces, sovereign identity and programmable trust. I am excited too to kickof this space together with @ronentk.me @bmann.ca and you.

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Awesome, thanks for the intro! I wasn’t aware of PiPup, cool to learn about it :slight_smile:
Love the “replies as comments” feature!

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Hey all, Bart-Jan here. My main focus is research in the rare diseases space. Ataxia’s in general and Friedreich Ataxia and VPS13 in particular.

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Hello everyone!

I am not much of an expert on ATProto, but I am very interested in new technology for science communication. I’ll probably mostly be lurking here and throw in an occasional remark or question. My background is computational physics, chemistry, and biology. What I am most interested in is machine-readable science communications and embedded computations.

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Hey! Thanks for setting this up!

I’m an astronomer and founded the astronomy feeds for our community. In the near future, we’d like to start doing PDS hosting for the astro community (+ more?), and I’d love to learn & collaborate on what PDS hosting at a “medium” size (~1k people) needs to look like.

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Welcome @emily.space ! If you’re comfortable sharing, I‘m curious about what your motivation is for PDS-hosting for the astro community. E.g., hosting large data, independent moderation, etc

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I think that the main thing is independence. It’s a theme across (most) of astronomy: most astronomy data is free for anyone to download; most astronomy research uses FOSS software like Astropy; and most papers are published in journals owned by the community. But one thing that has never had that level of independence is how our field communicates online, and so an astronomers-PDS feels like a natural extension of that philosophy.

Aside from that, I suspect that an astronomy PDS would encourage people to e.g. start building more astronomy-related things on top of ATProto, because hosting longevity and independence could be guaranteed by us: things like live alerting systems, outreach tools, or things that require large data hosting (like images).

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Hey there! My name is Ethan, I am a Research Software Engineer at the Open Molecular Software Foundation wherein I am trying to modernize our software teams’ DevOps flows. My background is primarily in software engineering in a variety of fields but I have a passion for enabling research in new ways! Looking forward to contributing and learning!

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Hey friends, it’s great to see this going.

My name’s Robin and I wear a few hats, but the ones I’m bringing to this thread (can you bring hats to threads? I guess you can) are:

  • In a previous life I was CTO of science.ai, a startup that made software for scholarly publishing. Our approach was geared towards traditional-style articles but leaning heavily on schema.org for anything structured in there. This aligns well with AT because it means that the metadata can be posted to the network and reused in cool ways. We also had peer-review flows, a vernacular of HTML to publish more semantically on the web, that kind of stuff. One thing I could also unearth is a high-quality parser for .docx that could help import legacy content.
  • I also have slow but ongoing work on an AT-friendly container format that makes it possible to safely publish arbitrary interactive web content.

Anyway, really looking forward to this!

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Hello everyone, my name is Barry Prendergast.

I’m a designer/product manager/tinkerer based in Berlin, with 20+ years experience building things. For the last 5 years, I’ve been working in scholarly communications and academic publishing, creating products and services for authors, editors, reviewers, research integrity investigators, librarians, and funders.

I’m joining this group (thanks for the link @bmann.ca ) because I believe AT Protocol represents the future of scholarly communication and communities. Publishing atomically on AT can let researchers share work transparently and collaboratively (without fear of being scooped or losing rights) while building strong careers and community.

The foundational elements are in place: open standards, data interoperability, collaboration tools and individual ownership with verifiable identities, portable public PDS, shared lexicons for document types (soon including peer reviews? and indexes?), plus labelers and moderation lists to surface quality and uphold research integrity. Feeds support dissemination and discovery.

And it’s all getting better every day.

I’m seeing that the momentum and community are here too so it seems like the right time to get involved and start experimenting.

I’m currently working with the Thomas Kuhn Foundation, a nascent non-profit eager to identify and expedite discoveries and paradigm shifts. We want to collaborate with others exploring how to design shared tools and spaces for open, continuous research authoring, curation, dissemination, and consumption.

We’re looking to meet folks eager to maximize this opportunity through collaboration, exploration, and contribution of their time, knowledge, and even funding.

Excited to collaborate with others who see this potential. My DMs are always open. Bluesky / LinkedIn / Signal :waving_hand:

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