Open-Source Community Call: the latest technology updates in open research communication

Innovators share the latest updates and opportunities in the open-source space for research communication and publishing.
Labs
  • Views 358
  • Annotations

On February 24, eLife Innovation hosted the latest community call. Seven presenters shared updates on their work, including Popper 2.0, Outbreak Science rapid PREreview (OSrPRE), Open Climate Knowledge and more.

Daniela Saderi from PREreview presented the initiative’s latest collaboration with Outbreak Science: Outbreak Science Rapid PREreview (OSrPRE). This is an open web platform for rapid reviews of outbreak-related preprints. They are currently calling for experts to help perform rapid reviews of preprints related to the coronavirus epidemic to accelerate scientific discovery. The PREreview team is now hiring a developer or a team of developers to work with them on the new version of the open-source PREreview platform. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Daniela.

Simon Worthington introduced the brand new Open Climate Knowledge Project. Motivated by the lack of open and structured climate research literature, the team has now started a FORCE11 working group with the vision to create an open climate change research knowledge graph. Their approach is to use machine learning to extract structured information from open climate research literature, based on the work of the InstruMinetal team at the eLife Innovation Sprint 2019. They are currently looking for help on getting up-to-date statistics on open climate content, and encourage everyone interested to join their working group.

Ivo Jimenez shared the latest updates from Popper 2.0, a multi-container workflow execution engine that allows researchers to more easily reproduce, validate and share computational and data-intensive experiments, inspired by a DevOps approach. He invites everyone interested to visit the project’s GitHub home and stay updated by joining the community’s Gitter channel.

Lilly Winfree from the Open Knowledge Foundation shared updates from the csv,conf,v5 organising team. Csv,conf is a community conference featuring talks on data sharing and analysis from science, journalism, government and open source. This year’s conference will take place May 13–14 in Washington D.C., and the organisers invite all open data and science enthusiasts to participate. Two keynotes for the conference have been announced, and the full programme will be published later this month.

Stefanie Haustein from ScholCommLab introduced Metrics Literacies, an open education and community project with the vision to improve the understanding and use of scholarly metrics. The project aims to explore the efficacy of educational resources in different formats for various stakeholder groups within the research ecosystem, with the goal of producing CC-BY materials on metrics that can then be adapted and used by the broader community.

Jo Havermann presented AfricArXiv, a platform for disseminating preprints from and about Africa. Born at the Africa Open Science and Hardware Summit in 2018, the project aims to bridge the gap between communities that disseminate research in different languages throughout the continent, and highlight the importance of indigenous and traditional knowledge in research. The platform is looking for further support and partnerships towards becoming an independent African-owned platform, and also encourages everyone interested to endorse the African Principles for Open Access in Scholarly Communication.

Last but not least, Hannah Sonntag from EMBO shared new tools in the SourceData project. SmartFigures are ‘figure-data packages’, which include machine-readable tags for all relevant information about the presented result, with direct links to external databases and underlying research data. SmartFigures Editor allows researchers to pack their own research results into SmartFigure-packages and edit SmartFigure’s meta information just like a text editor, but store them in a machine-readable fashion. She invites everyone to visit the project website and try the tool.

We hope to hear from Adam Hyde about the Open Publishing Awards 2020 on the next call, which takes place in late June and is hosted by one of our community call partners, FORCE11.

Full notes from the February call, including questions and comments that were made in writing only during and directly after the meeting, are available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PGJYDG0YnJzxfaDlixNxeHc62tWU_8lyD3Ep2thSXB8/edit#

#

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.