Call for Scientific App Ideas
Have a great idea for a scientific app but lack the coding skills to develop it? We’d like to hear it!
Submit your app idea by August 10th (12pm PDT) and we’ll present it to the developer community, who have the skills to make your dream app a reality. Ten (10) randomly selected winners will receive a PLoS t-shirt (Terms and Conditions apply).
Apps will be created by mining PLoS and Mendeley APIs and will have the potential to make your life easier and science more open. Here are just a few of the possibilities:
- Mine PLoS articles for statistically relevant words or phrases using the Solr API
- See how many people are reading your papers and how you compare to other researchers on Mendeley with ReaderMeter
- Determine the top papers read by researchers in particular subject areas in both Mendeley and the PLoS journal family
How To Submit Your App Idea:
- Complete the form at the Binary Battle App Idea Submission site [UPDATE: Now closed!] OR
- Tweet your idea with the hashtag “#binarybattle” OR
- Leave a comment on this blog post with your idea and an email address
If you’re a developer, you may wish to enter your completed app into the Binary Battle by September 30th, 2011.
[…] Research is hard enough without having to deal with crappy software and programs that don’t talk to one another. Part of the problem is that many people who write great code aren’t scientists, so they don’t know what scientists need. We’d like to solve that problem, so we’ve teamed up with the Public Library of Science to issue a “Call for Apps“. […]
I’d really love an app that could identify birdsong and frog calls. You could record the sounds, it checks a database, and gives you potential matches. It’d also have a function where you could type in the name of a species, and it plays audio of the call/song.
It could have different versions for different regions. The first region, naturally, would be Sydney, Australia. đŸ™‚
App idea: restrict text search to figure legends. Results should include link to published figure online + email of corresponding author for permission request + links ref. publications in legend.
There is a web site maintained by Cornell, that handles N. American birds. I recommend it highly. We played some of the sounds near an open window, and the two Pileated Woodpeckers we have in the area came to investigate.
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/search
They may know of a similar site for Australia….
[…] eight days after announcing our call for App ideas, we received over 70 top-rate suggestions for scientific and medical apps from our community. Many […]
I see I’m way too late for entering ideas, so possibly my post will never be read.
But I find it really annoying that, because I have signed up for PLoS ONE RSS feeds under several headings, if a paper falls under more than one heading I get the notification more than once.
So: an app for PLoS ONE that collates RSS results from several headings into a single stream with no duplicated hits.