van Geest Geert, Haefliger Yann, Zahn-Zabal Monique, Palagi Patricia M
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Quartier Sorge-Bâtiment Amphipôle, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
PLoS One. 2024 Dec 5;19(12):e0308729. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308729. eCollection 2024.
A wealth of excellent training and educational materials for the computational life sciences are scattered around the Internet, but they can be hard to find. Many materials reside in public Git repositories that are hosted on platforms such as GitHub and GitLab. Glittr.org is a manually curated database of Git repositories, which enables users to find educational materials that would otherwise be hard to identify. With the application, users can search and compare educational materials based on topic and author, but also on engagement metrics such as stargazers (bookmarks) and recency (days since last commit). Glittr.org currently contains 664 entries, which are assigned to six different categories within the domain of computational life sciences. By analysing the database, we reveal insights in the availability of materials per topic, collaboration patterns of developers, and licensing practices. This knowledge helps to understand in which areas open educational materials are scant, the importance of Git for collaboration on educational materials and how licensing can be improved to enhance sharing and reuse. Taken together, we show that Glittr.org contains a wealth of connected and openly available metadata. Therefore, it enhances adherence to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, which benefits learners, teachers and trainers in the entire life sciences community and beyond.
互联网上散布着大量用于计算生命科学的优秀培训和教育材料，但它们可能很难找到。许多材料存放在托管在GitHub和GitLab等平台上的公共Git存储库中。Glittr.org是一个人工策划的Git存储库数据库，它能让用户找到那些否则很难识别的教育材料。通过该应用程序，用户不仅可以根据主题和作者搜索和比较教育材料，还可以根据诸如关注者（书签）和时效性（上次提交以来的天数）等参与度指标进行搜索和比较。Glittr.org目前包含664个条目，这些条目被分配到计算生命科学领域内的六个不同类别中。通过分析该数据库，我们揭示了每个主题的材料可用性、开发者的合作模式以及许可实践方面的见解。这些知识有助于了解开放教育材料在哪些领域稀缺、Git对于教育材料合作的重要性以及如何改进许可以促进共享和再利用。总体而言，我们表明Glittr.org包含大量相互关联且公开可用的元数据。因此，它增强了对FAIR（可查找、可访问、可互操作、可重用）原则的遵守，这对整个生命科学领域及其他领域的学习者、教师和培训师都有益处。
