When Open Access Is the Norm

"[P]roject leader Tracy Teal, a microbial ecologist and bioinformatician, cautions that GitHub is less than ideal for the purpose. “The capacity to share, track versions and do diffs makes it very appealing for collaborative document and lesson development,” she says, “but it currently has too many technical barriers for people without programming experience. The activation energy to use it is just too high.”

Maybe GitHub will continue to evolve in ways that lower those barriers. Or maybe open source alternatives, like GitLab, will enable that evolution. Although it hosts millions of open source projects, GitHub itself isn’t an open source project. GitLab, though, operates under a dual license and offers an open source community edition. One way or another, the model of collaboration that GitHub has popularized is vital to the progress of science, and seems likely to prevail."