eLife has announced a partnership with fellow non-profit Open Knowledge Maps, which runs the world’s largest visual search engine for scientific literature, to improve the service’s technology platform. This is the latest collaboration under eLife’s Innovation Initiative, aimed at supporting open-source projects in the research discovery and communication space.
With eLife’s backing, Open Knowledge Maps will improve the serviceability, reusability and structure of its platform while maintaining current functionality. The aim is to make it easier to introduce new features, which will in turn help improve the growth of the organisation’s community of contributors.
eLife and Open Knowledge Maps have come together through their common commitment to speed up research dissemination and curation. eLife was started in 2011 to challenge the status quo in science publishing. Towards this end, the organisation has established a highly respected open-access journal and is committed to the use of open-source technologies for accelerating the discovery, use and consumption of new research.
On a similar line, Open Knowledge Maps is dedicated to improving the visibility of scientific knowledge for science and society. Its website allows users to search for scientific topics within various disciplines and create knowledge maps from the results. These maps use machine learning and open bibliographic data to provide an instant overview of a topic, linking to relevant papers and concepts that are related to the search.
eLife’s support for Open Knowledge Maps reflects its ongoing commitment to collaborating on the maintenance of open-source projects and reuse of open technology. “We are proud to be able to endorse an organisation whose ethos encompasses our core values of openness, collaboration and reuse,” says Emmy Tsang, eLife Innovation Community Manager. “We understand the importance of open-source project maintenance, as well as the lack of funding and support in this area, and are excited to contribute to the continuity of this innovative initiative. It will be great to work with the Open Knowledge Maps team and exchange ideas on the use of machine-learning and web technologies to drive forward research discovery, sharing and consumption.”
“We’re very excited to have eLife’s support for this project,” adds Peter Kraker, Founder and Chairman of Open Knowledge Maps. “This work is crucial for implementing new features, which is in turn important for the success of our supporting membership program. eLife’s backing gives us a unique opportunity to improve our growth and sustainability that might have been difficult to come by elsewhere.”
eLife and Open Knowledge Maps invite technology developers to find out more about the software architecture of the tool, as well as the upcoming upgrade and how to contribute, in this blog post.
For more information about Open Knowledge Maps, visit https://openknowledgemaps.org.
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eLife
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About
eLife is a non-profit organisation inspired by research funders and led by scientists. Our mission is to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. We invest in innovation through open-source tool development to accelerate research communication and discovery. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, the Wellcome Trust and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Learn more at elifesciences.org/about.
