On June 29, 2020, FORCE11 hosted the latest in a series of Open Source Community Calls held in partnership with Dryad and eLife. These calls are an informal way to share and discuss efforts that promote open approaches to research communication. This month’s call was organised in part by members of the FORCE2020 Program Committee and facilitated by the FORCE11 Communications Committee. Seven presenters shared their work, on open source repositories, awards, publishing platforms, and more. A summary of the call follows.
Adam Hyde from the Coko Foundation provided an overview of the Open Publishing Fest 2020, which recently occurred. Including a breakdown of how the event was set up, organized, run, and ultimately pulled the virtual, and global event, Adam discussed logistics completed in a short six week time span from project idea to the event’s occurrence. For more information: https://coko.foundation/the-anatomy-of/
Chris Hartgerink, Independent Researcher, introduced the Modular Publishing Unit, a project built on his research to extend scholarly communications infrastructures for publishing, data protocols, and scholarly profiles. An article about this work is openly available: Hartgerink, C. Verified, Shared, Modular, and Provenance Based Research Communication with the Dat Protocol. Publications 2019, 7, 40. https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/7/2/40/htm#
Tony Alves of Aries Systems and Stephen Laverick of Green Fifteen discussed the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA), a collaborative project to facilitate publishing workflows and work through common challenges in scholarly publishing. It is becoming a NISO protocol in effort to standardize, document, and implement a more common approach. More information on MECA can be found at: https://www.manuscriptexchange.org/
Carolina Sanchez of MyScienceWork provided a summary of Polaris, a next generation Open Source Repository platform. Including a general overview, she discussed features such as the ability to use Polaris without any programming knowledge, interoperability features, and AI. For a demo of Polaris and more information, visit: https://www.mysciencework.com/polaris-os.
Alex Freeman, Founder of Octopus, a primary research record system, introduced Octopus and provided a brief demo and description. She also requested feedback, as the system reaches completion. For more information on Octopus and to view a demo, go to: https://demo.science-octopus.org/. To provide feedback, please go to: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdT2faM4oW5oekiSIMimsO6zBNsIB3oOlx-1jU1kNDUDkdluQ/viewform
Christina Drummond of Educopia Institute / OAeBU Data Trust updated the group on to . their work on “Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage”: https://educopia.org/data_trust/ They are looking for additional participants and invite contributions here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeyVBxb1yiaeRI03vGbPq4MWbgY-a3fsDkLbYyCdhxYGYfZzQ/viewform.
Heather Staines of the Knowledge Futures Group provided an overview of the scholarly publishing platform PubPub. An Open Source platform and tool, PubPub incorporates standards for privacy and can be used for general workflows. To learn more: https://www.pubpub.org/
Full notes from the June call, including questions and answers are available at: https://elifesci.org/oscc-agenda. The recording, which unfortunately misses a few minutes at the top of the call is available here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeoSUmlntunLJU29ODPzx6g/videos
On the next call in September, hosted by Dryad, we hope to hear from Peter Murray-Rust, Martyn Rittman, Katie Hoeberling, Diana Kornbrot, and others. Follow the open agenda and add your project to future calls at https://elifesci.org/oscc-agenda
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