Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
blog.banyan.co
blog.banyan.co
With Banyan, your data will always be open & you're free to take it with you anywhere. If you want to move your repos to github/bitbucket/another service, you're easily able to do so
[1] - http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/confirmed-elsevier-has-boug...
By the way OSF costs money if it is done by scientists. Those scientists get paid by someone. They spent shit ton of money (in form of salaries + time) building it + publishing it. Science works on government grants, i.e. taxpayer money. It is actually a fairly profitable industry, and NIH grants are the biggest contributor to capital expenditure of US Research Universities. The 55% overhead coming out of each grant is basically the "profit margin". Calling something by a different name doesn't make it so. Your github profile says you're at MIT, around Cambridge. So am I. What do you think pays for all the shiny buildings around Kendall? It's not just philanthropy.
I'm not sure I'd call grant income that gets reinvested in infrastructure and educational expenditures "profit." Not only do private corporations buy shiny buildings, but they also have a legal obligation to make as much money for their shareholders as they possibly can. MIT doesn't.
> Not only do private corporations buy shiny buildings, but they also have a legal obligation to make as much money for their shareholders as they possibly can.
This seems to be a popular belief, but it's simply not true. Private companies have no legal requirement to make profits or pay dividends. Even public companies, do not have to by law, maximize profits ("make as much money").[1] Corporate officers do of course, have an obligation to act in the best interests of the company, and have maintain certain fiduciary duties.
[1] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...
I've been trying to collaborate my professor on academic papers with git. We tried my own git server, github, but they still seem to be too much trouble for people who do not use git regularly. Online LaTex editor integrated with the git service would be great! It would be better if you could add code highlight in the editor though. Also realtime PDF preview (maybe not realtime.. it'll be overwhelming for the server. A compile button?) would be awesome!
And for sure we need a separate community from Github just for academic publications. Mixing softwares and papers altogether is not a good idea. Banyan is really cool!
Congratulations on launching!
Rudel (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Rudel) is one example of collaborative editing in emacs.
We launched a private version of Banyan to a few of you here months ago. Since then, our team has been hard at work trying to make Banyan the future of open science. Todays launch is just the start.
We know we have alot of work to do. Over the next few months we plan to tackle science, reproducibility, and make existing tools more awesome through our API.
I want to be as transparent as possible. Im happy to answer any questions you might have.
Got something more descriptive you can link to?
The blog appears to be down, but as an individual very interested in open science could you explain a bit more about the use-case Banyan targets? I imagine this is very focused on things like analysis or computational biology where the primary iterative factor is measured in lines of code changed.
Do you see this tool being used by adjacent sciences? Life sciences, human subject research, materials?
Our first target was initially bioinformatics, but we are moving into supporting all sciences. Our goal is to make sharing, collaborating & publishing research as simple as possible.
We are huge fans of git, and we want to leverage git to enhance every part of science. For us, that means integrations or improvements with existing tools like latex, ipython, etc.
I believe that open science hasnt taken off because there is no platform for it, no tool makes it easy/simple for the user, and the user isnt incentivized [1].
[1] Programmers apply for jobs now with their github/bitbucket profiles & there open source contributions. Why not provide scientists the same option?
Have you ever heard of the AAVSO? American Association of Variable Star Observers? It strikes me that you need a critical mass in the field you target and a small group to roll out. Bioinformatics sounds a little large. AAVSO sounds just about the right size. Of course your more detailed research will unsurprisingly have a different conclusion than mine, etc.
"I believe that open science hasnt taken off because there is no platform for it"
Well, the AAVSO has been around a lot longer than the web. Even if they're not eventually users, their experiences over the last century or so would make an interesting case study for you, one way or another.
Thanks, there are more of us every day! Check out http://noogastartups.com I think Tennessee is the next great startup state.
Banyan looks great. I've been mentioning Github to my advisor, but I think this is much more suitable.
When you say science, git, and LaTeX, Linux is often the next word in the sequence...
Our second difference is our focus on scientific specific tools like latex, ipython, etc.
I gather that your Mac app may be simpler, but it's not available yet.
Since I don't already have dozens of projects on banyan, it's hard to see the value.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to link to some repos with examples of the fancy LaTeX or IPython formatting
I think it's great to target the wider, non-developer audience. They could benefit immensely from version control, distributed systems, and smart editing tools. It could be a big benefit to the whole scientific community.
I'm very excited to tell people that github for science is now a thing. I'll be signing up for sure.
Also, I tried to submit my email to be notified for the mac app and was told it was invalid (it was just a standard @gmail address).
The forms are broken unfortunately. I have submitted a fix, but we wont be deploying until later tonight when the HN craziness slows down. In the interim, you can drop me your email at toni (at) banyan.co and I will manually add it to the list
[1] http://us-ignite.org/2012/08/gig-tank-demo-day-delivers/
Anyway, a time limit is a good idea.
And anyway, when there are timestamps, it's harder to steal an idea. It actually may encourage people to write notes on things to do, share some partial proofs, etc
Wouldnt a better interaction be to display a larger screenshot on the first click? Thats what I would expect?
Oh, just call a marketing guy a marketing guy.
I'll have to look into how it manages trust, for things like this.
No greater than #888 on a white background, otherwise you have to bold the text.
This smells fishy.
We have used gitlab components & also contributed back to gitlab. Its a great project, but I can assure you we have an entirely different product. Were just leveraging OSS projects like any other startup
Hurray - VINES is finally open sourced!
"GitHub of Science"
Aw.
My first job in IT, I got tossed into the deep end of LAN administration - sink or swim - and Banyan was the pool.