Interesting open source and free tutorial sites

I just wrote about how I think Plan S is not the right solution for open science. This may be a controversial opinion, but rather than focusing on that, I want to focus on what we can add to the current status quo without having to make a total upheaval and without potential unintended consequences. That is, namely, self-published, high quality, open source and free tutorials and explanatory posts alongside peer-reviewed articles. Here are a few examples.

Adaptive Optics for Microscopy – Organized by Martin Booth, the PI of the Dynamic Optics and Photonics Group at Oxford, this site may be the gold standard of what I am imagining. It is mostly technical guidelines and practical tutorials, but each post has a DOI and clear authorship, and it is done in a clear, organized, and transparent way. A site like this with a larger number of summaries for laypeople is exactly what I have in mind for enabling open science.

Wavefrontshaping.net – Another gold standard by Sébastien Popoff, a CNRS researcher at the Institut Langevin in Paris. The home page feed has a title, link to a manuscript, a big clear figure, and a short summary. Then the detailed post has more, large and clear figures, and a longer summary of the work. If every researcher had a blog/website like this science would be so much easier to follow and available to all.

Complex Light – A blog and website by Claudio Conti from La Sapienza in Rome. His research is very theoretical and advanced, so these explainers are even more important to communicate the work. Another example that we can all model our own websites and communications on.

These are only three examples, albeit very good ones, and are only in the areas of optics and photonics. Do you know of any more examples in the same fields or other fields?

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