The eLife Innovation Sprint is a two-day collaborative event where we bring together 70 developers, designers, data scientists, researchers, product technologists, communication specialists and more to develop prototypes to change the ways we share and do research. This year's Sprint will take place September 2–3, online.
During our call for project proposals, we received 29 submissions from all around the world. We are happy to announce that we have selected these 15 projects to be worked on at the Sprint.
More detailed aims, plans for Sprint work and types of contributors for each project are available on our website. We invite everyone interested in contributing to these projects and passionate about open science and research culture to apply to participate in the Sprint, by June 7.
Data paper skeleton tools for life sciences
Led by Yo Yehudi, Lilly Winfree and Phillippe Rocca-Serra
We would like to take the pain out of beginning to write papers, making it easy to automatically generate the parts of a paper that can be easily scaffolded and incentivising reproducible papers by ensuring the scaffolds include well-structured data and metadata.
Covidpreprints.com
Led by Jonny Coates, Zhang-He Goh and Gautam Dey
We aim to enable wider access and understanding by directly addressing issues with the discovery of reliable science and associated reviews or summaries. By placing the science in the context of pandemic progression, we aim to help readers understand the role of open science in solving global problems.
The Invisible Wall/The Clean Slate
Led by Renuka Kudva, Nafisa M. Jadavji and Gabriela Gaona
We envision a mutual support-driven platform for early-career researchers by early-career researchers. We believe it is time to have open conversations about bullying and harassment in academia, and that this will lead us towards a systemic change in the long term.
Expanding Open Grants
Led by Hao Ye
Demystify and democratise academic research and the “hidden curriculum” with an open repository of grant proposals, fellowship applications, and job statements.
A badge for FAIR software
Led by Mateusz Kuzak, Carlos Martinez Ortiz and Jurriaan Spaaks
We want to incentivise research software engineers and researchers who develop software to implement the simple recommendations for making software more FAIR, by making their effort and compliance more visible to the rest of the word.
Research References Tracking Tool (R2T2)
Led by Diego Alonso Álvarez, Valentin Sulzer and Jez Cope
We envision a tool to improve citations from software that can be incorporated into other software to record the references used, wherein the code information from those references was applied.
Share your insight, inspire the next step
Led by Michiel van der Vaart and Jan Paul Grollé
We want to provide researchers with an intuitive tool to concisely formulate why a publication is interesting, who it is interesting for, and what the next step should be.
Participants working at the eLife Sprint 2019. Photo credit: Jess Brittain Photography. Source.
Crawling data portals for improving research communication
Led by Andreiwid Correa and Kellyton Brito
It remains difficult for consumers of open data to discover, select and compare open-data repositories and platforms. A solution to collate and display this information will provide valuable data for benchmarking exercises, and ultimately help inform consumers.
PhraseScope
Led by Alexander Powell
Current content discovery mechanisms are based on indexing services that users have a stake in but little influence over. PhraseScope will provide an intuitive discovery tool for identifying content items related to whatever research content the user happens to be viewing currently, whilst placing indexing in the hands of the user community.
The Software Citation Project
Led by Sarthak Sehgal
As a research software engineer, I would like to develop open software that can be cited just like research papers. I would like to submit a software citation to a publication using existing open software tools, in order to make my software citable and trackable to funders and reusable by other researchers.
Annotate them all
Led by Tiago Lubiana
Teaching computers how to read articles can bridge the publication-to-knowledge gap, accelerate scientific discovery and save us time to focus on improving research culture.
Digest-preprints
Led by Shyam Saladi
We need a continuous integration (CI) for papers. A CI infrastructure would allow for easy, community-driven development of programmatic checks and would allow decoupling efforts at UIs for authors/reviewers to understand issues detected.
Affordabee: Low-Cost Open-Access Publishing
Led by Caleb Kibet, Kennedy Mwangi and Jennifer Mutisya
We envision a platform that can help students and early-career researchers identify journals that can offer waivers or subsidies, and how to access them. We seek a platform that will reduce the APC cost barrier for students from resource-poor settings.
SciGen.Report
Led by Cassio Amorim
I hope to create a website that allows users to easily share and view any information they and the community have on the reproducibility of papers.
Code is Science
Led by João Paulo Taylor Ienczak Zanette, Isaac Miti and Yo Yehudi
Whilst it is generally agreed that scientific research needs to be peer-reviewed as part of the publication, this stipulation doesn’t always extend to peer-reviewing code. We aim to build infrastructure that clearly lists not only journal policies with regards to code artefacts, but also compliance with journal policy.
#
We welcome comments, questions and feedback. Please annotate publicly on the article or contact us at innovation [at] elifesciences [dot] org.
Do you have an idea or innovation to share? Send a short outline for a Labs blogpost to innovation [at] elifesciences [dot] org.
For the latest in innovation, eLife Labs and new open-source tools, sign up for our technology and innovation newsletter. You can also follow @eLifeInnovation on Twitter.
