Plutopy

Welcome to plutopy, a community that teaches and promotes open source planetary science!

The goal of this repository is to help scientists learn to use open source tools to improve the quality and reproducability of their research.

What is open source?

Broadly, open source describes anything publicly available that people can modify and share. There has been a recent surge in open practices being adopted in industry and academia and plutopy will help you leverage these practices for your own research. To read more about open source, see the links below:

• Why open source science?
• The open source way
• In practice: OSGEO's philosophy

Get started

Plutopy participation is open to everyone! To get acquainted with this repository and the basics of plutopy, you will need:

• A free Github account (sign up here)
• A computer with Git (try git --version in a terminal. No luck? See install guide here)
• About 20 minutes to complete the plutopy tutorial here

Not convinced?

Who can join plutopy?

Plutopy is open to anyone who is:

• interested in learning open source techniques for scientific research
• planning on sharing code with the wider community
• passionate about spreading open-source practices and making science more reproducible

What will I learn?

Currently, plutopy is focused on teaching the following skills:

• Git, GitHub and version control
• How to package research code to share with others
• Reproducible analysis with Jupyter notebooks

I already use open source practices in my research

Great! We are looking for experienced scientists who use open source tools on a day-to-day basis to help make plutopy more accessible to beginners and help us make open source practices the norm in academia.

I don't know anything about Pluto, planets and image data

That's ok! This repository is organized as a planetary image analysis package to serve as an example, but the open source tools taught here are broadly applicable to basic research in all academic disciplines.

How it works

Learning with Plutopy is entirely self-paced. You will start here with a basic introduction to Git, GitHub and the Plutopy repository. From there, you will be ready to start new tutorials, contribute your insights or improvements to the main repository, or use Plutopy as an example to open-source your own code. You receive feedback on your contributions as you progress in your learning. Over time, Plutopy will grow with member contributions to become a better resource for learning open-source science.

Applying skills to my own work

Plutopy is intended to be used as an example repository for academics interested in releasing an open-source code repository. All examples you find in plutopy are open-source (see our License) and can be edited or adapted for use in your own work, as long as plutopy is cited in any abstracts or publications that it supports (see citable DOI).

Joining and Contributing to Plutopy

Plutopy is made possible by its contributors. By completing the first tutorial, you will learn the basics of open-source collaboration by becoming a Plutopy contributor! If you already know the basics of Git and GitHub, but would like to contribute, you can first read CONTRIBUTING.md and then head over to the issue tracker to see what issues are open. All are welcome!

Code of Conduct

This repository is governed by a code of conduct. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for more details.

License

This repository is released under the MIT license for open and warranty-free use and reproduction. See the LICENSE for more details. To learn more about the importance of an open-source license, see this explanation. To learn what the legal jargon in a particular license means, check out ChooseALicense.com.