The eLife Innovation Sprint is a two-day collaborative event where we bring together 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 October 4–5, online and the themes we focussed on during our call for projects were:
- support reproducibility in research,
- promote diversity and inclusion in research,
- improve publishing practices (in journals, on preprint platforms, etc.),
- facilitate research collaborations.
During our call for project proposals, we received 18 submissions from all around the world. We are happy to announce that we have selected the following 9 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-source and research culture to apply to participate in the Sprint, by July 20.
Building tools for readable papers with clickable depth
Led by Milo Johnson
An open-source tool for writing readable papers with clickable depth. This tool would comprise two main modules: a hierarchical structure for organizing content and a suite of flexible content creation tools.
COAR Notify
Led by Paul Walk, Martin Klein
The COAR Notify project aim is to complete the development of a model for repository review requests notifications, building on the standard W3C Linked Data Notifications protocol and the W3C Activity Streams 2.0 vocabulary.
Database for multi-dimensional point-based article rating
Led by Cooper Smout, Dawn Holford, Paola Masuzzo
We propose to develop a central database for organising and storing multidimensional point-based article ratings. This database will serve two key purposes:
- to amalgamate ratings from different preprint review platforms into a single location,
- to help researchers/journalists identify and find peer ratings of articles/preprints.
Genestorian
Led by Manuel Lera Ramirez
Genestorian is an open-source web application to document genetic modifications in model organism collections. Genestorian will keep a laboratory inventory of strains, oligonucleotides and plasmids with sequence traceability, using a relational database, in silico molecular biology libraries, and genome databases and allow users to document strain and plasmid generation unambiguously on the browser through an intuitive web interface. It will also provide programmatic access through an API, and enable data exportation in a machine-readable format.
Octopus
Led by Alexandra Freeman
Octopus is a platform designed to be the new primary research record where everyone coming with a new publication will be able to find the most closely related research question to link their new publication to.
R4E curriculum: for community-led reproducibility education
Led by April Clyburne-Sherin
R4E aims to apply an open-source development approach to community-led reproducibility education by creating and documenting a process of virtual collaboration of module creation from proposal, to review, to publishing.
Research group handbook
Led by Natalie Thurlby, James Thomas, Alastair Tanner
We aim to create a template of a research group handbook in GitHub and Jupyter Notebook, and add materials to help people use it.
Understanding repository structures through charts: a GitHub navigation tool
Led by Michał Krassowski
A code/data flow overview tool that can create an easy to use chart for understanding the repository structure given only its GitHub or GitLab URL.
VCMS: Virtual Conference Management System
Led by Simon Duerr
An open-source virtual conference management system (VCMS) to host smaller scientific meetings virtually at no cost.
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