Linda Amarante and Samantha White are two PhD students at American University in Washington, D.C., USA. Besides researching the role of the prefrontal cortex in decision making in rats, they help run the OpenBehavior website and its @OpenBehavior twitter account. There, they share and promote open source, low-cost software and hardware that can be used for behavioral neuroscience.

Linda and Samantha are excited to make scientists and non-scientists aware of the benefits of open science. They’ll show examples of how these creative projects can be used in neuroscience and other scientific disciplines, but also how they are interesting for the DIY hobbyists as well. In their week on @SfProcur, they hope to inspire us all with new ideas for scientific research and collaboration.

Background

Open Behavior is a repository of open science hardware and software that was launched in 2016 by Dr. Lex Kravitz and Dr. Mark Laubach. By making open-source projects easy to find, they want to help researchers look beyond expensive and rigid commercial lab equipment and adopt a more flexible and creative open-source mindset instead. Key to OpenBehavior is the idea of collaboration, creativity, and open-source science that can be made available to all.

A new project is posted each week and Linda and Samantha highlight interesting projects every day on twitter as well. Periodically, they interview researchers who have developed or used open-source software or hardware in neuroscience, to give readers a better idea of open-source science, as well as the people behind it. If you have an interesting project, the OpenBehavior team would love to hear from you!