Throughout history, scientists have gathered together to pool ideas and theories in order to combine minds and advance in the field. With today’s computer technology, it’s even easier to share information across the world. One way of doing this is by using open source software, which often comes as a simple download. The open source movement allows anyone to add or edit source code whether you are a student or administrator. The following list pertains to education open source software that specializes in science.
- Geographic Information Systems, also known as GIS, is a computer system for displaying data, capturing, checking, manipulating, storing, integrating, and analyzing data related to specific positions on the Earth’s surface. The software is generally used by scientists for handling maps.
- Plotting software packages that are open source can be used for semi-log plots, contour plots, mesh plots, pie charts, bar charts, and X-Y plots, among others.
- Microscope image processing open source software is used by biologists, chemical engineers, druggist, and researchers among others to analyze images from microscopes.
- Molecule viewer open source software is available for commercial, academic, and government researchers who wish to visualize and share their molecular information using industry standard formats.
- Molecular dynamics open source software forms simulations on the computer in which molecules and atoms interact, showing the motion of the particles. Scientists use this software to see and study molecules and proteins.
- Bioinformatics is used in molecular biology as an open source software option for studying informatics processes which occur in biotic systems. Since the 1980s, it has been used particularly in the study of genetics.
- Cheminformatics is open source software that allows chemists and pharmaceutical companies to share and manipulate information that relates to compounds.
- Grid Computing open source software helps scientists share research.
- Statistics software allows scientists to interact with and manipulate statistical data.