Get credit for your work!

Today I just want to share with you two (new – granted this one is already 2 years old) services that aim to make voluntary or open work more visible and credible. Many researchers often do a lot of work that is not really valued or even accounted for in academic hiring processes or funding proposals. Such as for instance the very process of participating as a (voluntary) reviewer for a peer-reviewed journal. Those of you who have done such a review know that it is often a tremendous amount of work (to do it properly). At least for me it costs several hours of work on a day that I could in return spend on my work instead. I am not criticising peer-review here ( also because of a lack of alternatives), but I often wondered if there is a way to get credit for your past peer-reviews. And there actually is a way as I have just found out. Publons is a website that allows you create a free profile page, where you can list your past reviews. They have a mailing verification system in place and are in direct contact with journals to check if you have actually done a review or not. You don’t have to publish the contents of your review, but you obviously can decide to do so (for instance if it was a particular well written study or just love embracing the openness). Give it a try.

The other service I want to introduce is called Depsy and was just started today. It a website that promotes innovative and highly used scientific software for researchers by scanning github, citations, download rates and dependencies. Why is that helpful and very important? Consider for instance that you developed a piece of software, make it openly available and even provide a reference so that users can cite you. However your work might just be incorporated into others (such as the rgdal package that just wraps up access to the gdal and proj4 libraries) or is not cited due to pure convenience. For instance I really wonder if most of the users of ggplot2 in R ever called citation(“ggplot2”) and actually cited it in their work. Depsy is dedicating open-source projects their own page ( here for instance the one for ggplot2), which evaluate the overall impact of the software and how it has been (re)used since its release. Very cool and nice idea and I hope that this new service will finally provide credit for all those programmers out there so that maybe one day creating open-source scientific software will be properly valued.