Have you ever wanted to post a summary of a paper you published, but didn’t know where to do it? Or perhaps you thought about writing a blog, but you worried that no one would find it on your personal website. Or maybe you just wanted to post an announcement that would be seen by the entire planetary science community, such as an advertisement for a job, a workshop or a conference.
If so, you probably realized that there are currently no good solutions for our community. Society run platforms offer some of these services, but they are often only accessible with a paying account or are cumbersome to use. There are many email lists for various types of announcements, but these are hard to find, they are limited in the length of what can be posted, and they lack graphical content. There are some popular commercial blogging platforms that can be used by planetary scientists, but these usually require an account to access, they are bloated with trackers and ads, and they have questionable privacy policies.
It is for these reasons that we created The Planetary Research Blog. This website is a blogging platform that can be accessed by anyone for free. There are no ads, no intrusive trackers, and no nonsense. We aim to provide a space were planetary scientists can share their work not only with their colleagues, but with the general public alike. On our platform, you can express your opinion about policies that affect our community without being censored. You can advertise events that may be of interest to your colleagues. And, you can publish any planetary science material that you would put in a personal blog.
Our platform welcomes posts in five categories:
- Announcements are for events and news items that would be of interest to people who work in the field of planetary science.
- Careers are for job announcements and other open positions.
- Commentaries are for posts that express an opinion about policies that affect the planetary science community.
- Planetary Research posts provide summaries of scientific work that are published in our diamond open access journal Planetary Research.
- And Blogs are for everything else.
Posts on The Planetary Research Blog may have co-authors, may include images and videos, and may include arbitrary tags. Posts can be sorted by category, author, and tags. Authors retain the copyright to whatever they publish, and their work can be shared in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). Visitors to our site can keep informed of new activity by using our RSS feeds, by following us on Mastodon, or through a weekly email digest.
If you would like to be an author on our site, it is only necessary to first become a member of the Planetary Research Cooperative. Our non-profit association supports the dissemination of scientific research in planetary science, and membership is free after accepting the association’s code of conduct. In addition to this blog, our association hosts several other online services that aim to foster interactions among planetary scientists and that allow researchers to share their work. Members can create accounts on SolarSystem.video (a Peertube video server), SolarSystem.social (a Mastodon social media server), and SolarSystem.forum (a Mattermost server for collaboration).
Welcome to The Planetary Research Blog!
