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Data sharing pilot to report and reflect on data policy challenges via 8 case studies

This week, FORCE2016 is taking place in Portland, USA. The FORCE11 yearly conference is devoted to the utilisation of technological and open science advancements towards a new-age scholarship founded on easily accessible, organised and reproducible research data.

As a practical contribution to the scholarly discourse on new modes of communicating knowledge, Prof. Cameron Neylon, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Australia, and collaborators are to publish a series of outputs and outcomes resulting from their ongoing data sharing pilot project in the open access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

Starting with their Grant Proposal, submitted and accepted for funding by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), over the course of sixteen months, ending in December 2016, they are to openly publish the project outputs starting with the grant proposal.

The project will collaborate with 8 volunteering IDRC grantees to develop Data Management Plans, and then support and track their development. The project expects to submit literature reviews, Data Management Plans, case studies and a final research article with RIO. These will report and reflect on the lessons they will have learnt concerning open data policies in the specific context of development research. Thus, the project is to provide advice on refining the open research data policy guidelines.

“The general objective of this project is to develop a model open research data policy and implementation guidelines for development research funders to enable greater access to development research data,” sum up the authors.

“Very little work has been done examining open data policies in the context of development research specifically,” they elaborate. “This project will serve to inform open access to research data policies of development research funders through pilot testing open data management plan guidelines with a set of IDRC grantees.”

The researchers agree that data constitutes a primary form of research output and that it is necessary for research funders to address the issue of open research data in their open access policies. They note that not only should data be publicly accessible and free for re-use, but they need to be “technically open”, which means “available for no more than the cost of reproduction, and in machine-readable and bulk form.” At the same time, research in a development context raises complex issues of what data can be shared, how, and by whom.

“The significance of primary data gathered in research projects across domains is its high potential for not only academic re-use, but its value beyond academic purposes, particularly for governments, SME, and civil society,” they add. “More importantly, the availability of these data provides an ideal opportunity to test the key premise underlying open research data — that when it is made publicly accessible in easily reusable formats, it can foster new knowledge and discovery, and encourage collaboration among researchers and organizations.”

However, such openness is also calling for extra diligence and responsibility while sharing, handling and re-using the research data. This is particularly the case in development research, where challenging ethical issues come to the fore. The authors point out the issues, raised by such practice, to be, among others, realistic and cost-effective strategies for funded researchers to collect, manage, and store the various types of data resulting from their research, as well as ethical issues such as privacy and rights over the collected data.

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Original source:

Neylon C, Chan L (2016) Exploring the opportunities and challenges of implementing open research strategies within development institutions. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8880. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8880

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Open-source collaborative platform to collect content from over 350 institutions’ archives

With the technical and financial capacity of any currently existing single institution failing to answer the needs for a platform efficiently archiving the web, a team of American researchers have come up with an innovative solution, submitted to the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and published in the open-access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

They propose a lightweight, open-source collaborative collection development platform, called Cobweb, to support the creation of comprehensive web archives by coordinating the independent activities of the web archiving community. Through sharing the responsibility with various institutions, the aggregator service is to provide a large amount of continuously updated content at greater speed with less effort.

In their proposal, the authors from the California Digital Library, the UCLA Library, and Harvard Library, give an example with the fast-developing news event of the Arab Spring, observed to unfold online simultaneously via news reports, videos, blogs, and social media.

“Recognizing the importance of recording this event, a curator immediately creates a new Cobweb project and issues an open call for nominations of relevant web sites,” explain the researchers. “Scholars, subject area specialists, interested members of the public, and event participants themselves quickly respond, contributing to a site list that is more comprehensive than could be created by any curator or institution.”

“Archiving institutions review the site list and publicly claim responsibility for capturing portions of it that are consistent with local collection development policies and technical capacities.”

Unlike already existing tools supporting some level of collaborative collecting, the proposed Cobweb service will form a single integrated system.

“As a centralized catalog of aggregated collection and seed-level descriptive metadata, Cobweb will enable a range of desirable collaborative, coordinated, and complementary collecting activities,” elaborate the authors. “Cobweb will leverage existing tools and sources of archival information, exploiting, for example, the APIs being developed for Archive-It to retrieve holdings information for over 3,500 collections from 350 institutions.”

If funded, the platform will be hosted by the California Digital Library and initialized with collection metadata from the partners and other stakeholder groups. While the project is planned to take a year, halfway through the partners will share a release with the global web archiving community at the April 2017 IIPC General Assembly to gather feedback and discuss ongoing sustainability. They also plan to organize public webinars and workshops focused on creating an engaged user community.

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Original source:

Abrams S, Goethals A, Klein M, Lack R (2016) Cobweb: A Collaborative Collection Development Platform for Web Archiving. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8760. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8760

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Pericardial window operation less efficient in cases of lung cancer than any other cancer

Pericardial window operation, a procedure, where abnormal quantity of malignant fluid, or malignant pericardial effusion (MPE), surrounding the heart, is drained into the neighbouring chest cavity through a surgically placed tube, is commonly applied to patients diagnosed with cancer.

However, researchers from the Taipei Tzuchi Hospital, Taiwan, have now looked into the electronic medical records of 52 cancer patients, including 30 cases of lung-cancer, archived between 2005 and 2015. They conclude that the treatment is not as effective in lung cancer cases when compared to any other cancer patients. In their study, published in the open access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), they also suggest a few no inferior alternatives worth of consideration.

The authors retrieved retrospective data of the patients and compared them in terms of hospital stay length, overall mortality and overall length of survival. They also took details such as dates of operations, hospital discharge and death, into account.

As a result, they found out that there was not any significant difference between the treatment’s outcomes in the patients groups at the time of hospital release. On the other hand, over a longer ten-year timeline, it turned out that the lung cancer patients have experienced notably higher mortality rate.

Alternative treatments for MPE, such as less invasive, yet no less efficient, methods relying on needle punctures instead of an “open” approach, where internal organs and tissues are exposed, are proposed by the authors. However, they note that the decision for a treatment needs to be taken strictly individually.

“Since the MPE prognosis is multi-factorial, the superiority of percutaneous versus surgical approach is still controversial,” they explain.

In conclusion, the researchers point out that their survey is a single-institution based one and not quite extensive, so there is still need for research to track the relation between a type of cancer and the MPE treatments.

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Original source:

Chen R, Shen T, Tsai K, Hu C (2016) Pericardial window operation for malignant pericardial effusion may have worse outcomes for lung cancer than the other cancers. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8758. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8758

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Undergraduates survey cultural tourists’ attitudes and visual advertising in Malta

While advertising and promotion in general, specifically observed within the American society, is a largely researched topic, Dr János Tóth, Kodolányi János University of Applied Sciences, and the undergraduate students from the Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary have had their curiosity and attention drawn to a specific non-American and, therefore, underrepresented in such studies environment, namely the Maltese city of Msida.

Their grant proposal, published in the open-access Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), was funded under the framework of the New Széchényi Plan, so that the team could travel to the University of Malta, with whose help they surveyed the cultural tourists’ attitudes towards advertising in the Maltese city.

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Through their trip to the Mediterranean island country and the additional distance work in collaboration with the University of Malta, the team conducted a two-stage research in the area with a focus on visual advertisements located at popular tourist sites. There, the students applied the knowledge they had acquired in their university modules, such as Research Methods, Marketing Research, and Marketing Communication, to attain original scientific results about both the cultural tourists’ attitudes towards visual advertisements and the used text-level persuasion tools.

In the first phase of the project, the researchers carried out a survey at popular tourist sites, attended by international tourists. In such an environment advertisements need to appeal to visitors with different national and cultural backgrounds.

Then, in the second part of the study, the researchers examined the tools and techniques of persuasive communication in public advertising. They focused on cultural tourist sites, where advertisement is more specifically targeted. Although the visitors at such places are just as highly diverse in terms of their socio-cultural background, they have been drawn there by a relatively common goal. In fact, the researchers refer to these sites as advertisements on their own.

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In their paper, the team have also listed a number of benefits they intend to reap as a result of their survey. They have counted knowledge about the cultural tourists in Malta and their attitudes towards the local advertising techniques, as well as the opportunity to compare them with similar findings from Europe. They also intend to formulate empirical research-based recommendations to support decision makers in the marketing field. Moreover, their data and analysis are to build on the available literature concerning advertising communication and tourism research.

In order to make their research activities fully transparent and traceable, not only have they published their grant proposal in the open access Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), but they have also included a timeline of their tour in it. During the trip itself, the students took the initiative to give real-time updates about their experience via social media networks, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and personal blogs.

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Photos credit:

Dr János Tóth and Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary

 

Original source:

Tóth J (2016) Tools of Persuasion in Visual Advertisements at Maltese Sites of Cultural Tourism: A Social Science Analysis. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8726. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8726

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Better cancer care for Indigenous Canadians with arts and dialogue in a new proposal

With the number of First Nation, Inuit, and Métis (FNIM) Canadians diagnosed with cancer currently growing, it turns out that little is done to study and address their unique needs in a timely enough manner. In his grant proposal, submitted to the annual Canadian Institutes of Health Research competition for postdoctoral fellowships, Dr Chad Hammond at the University of Ottawa suggests an innovative and inclusive approach to studying the challenges within Indigenous communities in Ontario.

The proposed research, described in the open-access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), suggests a collaborative interdisciplinary approach using visual arts and participatory dialogue with stakeholders involved in cancer care for FNIM peoples.

Participants for the project will include 10 health care professionals, 5 health administrators, and 5 FNIM community leaders who will engage with photovoice and photo-elicitation techniques to develop priorities and solutions in FNIM cancer care in Ontario. By the end, a report of recommendations is to be generated and dispensed to participants, bringing together various experiences, themes, perspectives, and recommendations for improving the state of care. The final report will serve as the basis for discussions around implementing the recommendations, for which additional funding opportunities will be sought.

“The use of photography as data and for eliciting data marks an innovative and inclusive approach to studying challenges within FNIM cancer care, while extending the reach of established projects,” explains the author.

“Through strong partnerships and a stakeholder-driven agenda, this research promises to build timely knowledge exchange initiatives between professional stakeholders and to identify viable pathways toward improving cancer care for FNIM peoples in Ontario.”

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Original source:

Hammond C (2016) Widening the circle of care: An arts-based, participatory dialogue with stakeholders on cancer care for First Nations, Inuit,and Métis peoples in Ontario, Canada.Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8615. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8615

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Roadmap: Global research data management advisory platform combines DMPTool and DMPonline

Roadmap, a global data management advisory platform that links data management plans (DMPs) to other components of the research lifecycle is a new open science initiative from partners at the University of California Curation Center (UC3) of the California Digital Library (CDL), USA, and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), United Kingdom.

Both organizations sponsor and maintain such platforms, the DMPTool and DMPonline respectively. They allow researchers from around the world to create their data management plans in less time by employing ready-to-use templates with specific guidance tailored to address the requirements of specific funding agencies in the USA and the UK.

Recently, the proliferation of data sharing policies throughout the world has produced increasing demand for data management planning support from both organizations. Therefore, it makes sense for the CDL and DCC to consolidate efforts and move beyond a focus on national researchers and funders to extend their global outreach through Roadmap, a new open-source platform for data management planning. Their proposal was submitted to the Open Science Prize contest and is now published in the open access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

While the two teams have been working together unofficially and engaging in international initiatives, a formal partnership would signal to the global research community that there is one place to create DMPs and find advisory information.

“Research data management (RDM) that enables open science is now acknowledged as a global challenge: research is global, policies are becoming global, and thus the need is global,” explain the authors. “Open science has a global agenda, and by making DMPs true infrastructure in a global open access community we will elevate research and open data for reuse.”

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In their joint project, the two organizations will combine their experience along with all existing functionality from their tools regarding the DMP use case into a single technical platform.

“New work on our respective systems is already underway to enable internationalization, integrate with other organizations and technical platforms, and encourage greater openness with DMPs,” they explain. “By joining forces, the Roadmap system will consolidate these efforts and move beyond a narrow focus on specific funders in specific countries, and even beyond institutional boundaries, to create a framework for engaging with disciplinary communities directly.”

To facilitate data sharing, reuse, and discoverability, Roadmap will be integrated with a number of platforms such as the Open Science Framework, SHARE, the Crossref/Datacite DOI Event Tracking system and Zenodo, among others. “Linking systems and research outputs across the web increases the chances that data will be discovered, accessed, and (re)used,” note the authors.

The team’s plan for enhanced openness includes encouraging authors to share their newly created data management plans by setting their privacy on “public” by default. They also intend to assign digital object identifiers (DOIs) to all plans, thus making them citable and motivating their authors to make them openly accessible. As part of this initiative, five researchers have just published their DMPs, created with the DMPTool, in Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

“We see greater potential for the DMP as a dynamic checklist for pre- and post-award reporting; a manifest of research products that can be linked with published outputs; and a record of data, from primary through processing stages, that could be passed to repositories,” state the authors. “The DMP will therefore not only support the management of the data but boost its discoverability and reuse.”

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Original source:

Simms S, Jones S, Ashley K, Ribeiro M, Chodacki J, Abrams S, Strong M (2016) Roadmap: A Research Data Management Advisory Platform. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8649. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8649

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Empowering stakeholders: FP7 project EU BON shares know-how on biodiversity data policies

Engagement with relevant political authorities and other stakeholders is of crucial importance for a research project, making sure its objectives are in tune with the real-world problems and its results provide adapted solutions. The EU-funded FP7 project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) shares the outcomes, lessons learned and conclusions from a series of three roundtable meetings designed to identify stakeholder needs and promote collaboration between science and policy.

The collection of EU BON stakeholder roundtable reports provides a summarized overview of shared experiences gained in the three different workshops that were organized from 2013-2016. With more than 100 participants from over 20 countries altogether, the roundtable reports provide insights and exchange of ideas on highly relevant issues concerning policy, citizen science and local/regional stakeholders and its networks.

The roundtables seek to build up a stakeholder dialogue with exemplary sector-specific user communities to incorporate feedback loops for the products of EU BON, as well as to develop improvements of existing biodiversity data workflows. Being published via the innovative Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) journal conclusions, derived knowledge and results are now made available for other projects and the wider community to ensure their re-use.

The three roundtable papers report on conclusion on highly relevant issues related to biodiversity information and its open-access and availability, data workflows and integration of citizen science as well as science-policy interfaces.

“In each of the three detailed reports of the roundtables we outline its aims, intentions, as well as results and recommendations, that were drafted based on the roundtable discussions, world café sessions and working groups. Such project results are now published for the first time in the new series of EU BON results, featured in RIO, providing a unique new medium to share experiences, outcomes and conclusions,” comments Dr. Katrin Vohland, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.

“The three reports were published as workshop report provided by the Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) journal. This allows readers to publish, distribute and computationally analyse myriads of workshop reports that otherwise often get forgotten or just lost,” comments Prof. Lyubomir Penev, co-founder and publisher of RIO.

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Original Sources:

Rationale of the roundtables

Wetzel F, Hoffmann A, Häuser C, Vohland K (2016) 1st EU BON Stakeholder Roundtable (Brussels, Belgium): Biodiversity and Requirements for Policy. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8600. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8600

Vohland K, Häuser C, Regan E, Hoffmann A, Wetzel F (2016) 2nd EU BON Stakeholder Roundtable (Berlin, Germany): How can a European biodiversity network support citizen science? Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8616. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8616

Vohland K, Hoffmann A, Underwood E, Weatherdon L, Bonet F, Häuser C, Wetzel F (2016) 3rd EU BON Stakeholder Roundtable (Granada, Spain): Biodiversity data workflow from data mobilization to practice. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8622. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8622

General synthesis and lessons learnt from the three EU BON stakeholder roundtables

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About EU BON:

EU BON stands for “Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network” and is a European research project, financed by the 7th EU framework programme for research and development (FP7). EU BON seeks ways to better integrate biodiversity information and implement into policy and decision-making of biodiversity monitoring and management in the EU.

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Making the most out of biological observations data

Creating and maintaining a biodiversity data collection has been a much-needed worldwide exercise for years, yet there is no single standard on how to do this. This has led to a myriad of datasets often incompatible with each other. To make the most out of biodiversity data and to ensure that its use for environmental monitoring and conservation is both easy and legal, the FP7-funded EU project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) published recommendations that provide consistent Europe-wide Data Publishing Guidelines and Recommendations in the EU BON Biodiversity Portal.

The report “Data Policy Recommendations for Biodiversity Data. EU BON Project Report” featured in the Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) journal, is the first contribution in a pioneering comprehensive project outputs compilation taking advantage of RIO’s unique option to publish collections of project results.

Biodiversity data and information provide important knowledge for many biological, geological, and environmental research disciplines. Additionally, they are crucial for the development of strong environmental policies and the management of natural resources. Information management systems can bring together a wealth of information and a legacy of over 260 years of biological observations which are now dispersed in a myriad of different documents, institutions, and locations.

EU BON aims to build a comprehensive “European Biodiversity Portal” that will incorporate currently scattered Europe-wide biodiversity data, while at the same time helping to realize a substantial part of the worldwide Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON). To achieve this ambitious plan, EU BON identifies the strong need for a coherent and consistent data policy in Europe to increase interoperability of data and make its re-use both easy and legal.

“Biodiversity data and information should not be treated as commercial goods, but as a common resource for the whole human society. The EU BON data sharing agreement is an important step in this direction,” comments the lead author of the report Dr. Willi Egloff from Plazi, Switzerland.

In its report, the EU BON project analysis available single recommendations and guidelines on different topics. On this basis, the report provides structured guidelines for legislators, researchers, data aggregators, funding agencies and publishers to be taken into consideration towards providing standardized, easy-to-find, re-shareable and re-usable biodiversity data.

“We are extremely happy that EU BON is among the first to take advantage of our project outputs collections option in RIO. The first report they are publishing with us deals with issues of opening up data, and digitizing and collecting scientific knowledge, all close to RIO’s mission to open up the research process and promote open science,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Founder and Publisher of RIO.

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Original Source:

Egloff W, Agosti D, Patterson D, Hoffmann A, Mietchen D, Kishor P, Penev L (2016) Data Policy Recommendations for Biodiversity Data. EU BON Project Report. Research Ideas and Outcomes2: e8458. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8458

 

About EU BON:

EU BON stands for “Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network” and is a European research project, financed by the 7th EU framework programme for research and development (FP7). EU BON seeks ways to better integrate biodiversity information and implement into policy and decision-making of biodiversity monitoring and management in the EU.

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One place for all scholarly literature: An Open Science Prize proposal

Openly accessible scholarly literature is referred to as “the fabric and the substance of Open Science” in the present small grant proposal, submitted to the Open Science Prize contest and published in the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) open access journal. However, the scholarly literature is currently quite chaotically dispersed across thousands of different websites and disconnected from its context.

To tackle this issue, authors Marcin Wojnarski, Paperity, Poland, and Debra Hanken Kurtz, DuraSpace, USA, build on the existing prototype Paperity, the first open access aggregator of scholarly journals. Their suggestion is the first global universal catalog of open access scientific literature. It is to bring together all publications by automatically harvesting both “gold” and “green” ones.

Called Paperity Central, it is to also incorporate many helpful functionalities and features, such as a wiki-type one, meant to allow for registered users to manually improve, curate and extend the catalog in a collaborative, community-controlled way.

“Manual curation will be particularly important for “green” metadata, which frequently contain missing or incorrect information; and for cataloguing those publications that are inaccessible for automatic harvesting, like the articles posted on author homepages only,” further explain the authors.

To improve on its ancestor, the planned catalog is to seamlessly add “green” publications from across repositories to the already available articles indexed from gold and hybrid journals. Paperity Central is to derive its initial part of “green” content from DSpace, the most popular repository platform worldwide, developed and stewarded by DuraSpace, and powering over 1,500 academic repositories around the world.

All items available from Paperity Central are to be assigned with globally unique permanent identifiers, thus reconnecting them to their primary source of origin. Moreover, all different types of Open Science resources related to a publication, such as author profiles, institutions, funders, grants, datasets, protocols, reviews, cited/citing works, are to be semantically linked in order to assure none of them is disconnected from its context.

Furthermore, the catalog is to perform deduplication of each entry in the same systematic and consistent way. Then, these corrections and expansions are to be transferred back to the source repositories in a feedback loop via open application programming interfaces (APIs). However, being developed from a scratch, its code will possess many distinct features setting it apart from existing wiki-type platforms, such as Wikipedia, for example.

“Every entry will consist of structured data, unlike Wikipedia pages which are basically text documents,” explain the scientists. “The catalog itself will possess internal structure, with every item being assigned to higher-level objects: journals, repositories, collections – unlike Wikipedia, where the corpus is a flat list of articles.”

In order to guarantee the correctness of the catalog, Paperity Central is to be fully transparent, meaning the history of changes is to be made public. Meanwhile, edits are to be moderated by peers, preferably journal editors or institutional repository admins overlooking the items assigned to their collections.

In their proposal, the authors note that the present development plan is only the first phase of their project. They outline the areas where the catalog is planned to be further enhanced in future. Among others, these include involvement of more repositories and platforms, fully developed custom APIs and expansion on the scholarly output types to be included in the catalog.

“If we are serious about opening up the system of scientific research, we must plant it on the foundation of open literature and make sure that this literature is properly organized and maintained: accessible for all in one central location, easily discoverable, available within its full context, annotated and semantically linked with related objects,” explain the scientists.

“Assume we want to find all articles on Zika published in 2015,” they exemplify. “We can find some of them today using services like Google Scholar or PubMed Central, but how do we know that no other exist? Or that we have not missed any important piece of literature? With the existing tools, which have incomplete and undefined coverage, we do not know and will never know for sure.”

In the spirit of their principles of openness, the authors assure that once funded, Paperity Central will be releasing its code as open source under an open license.

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Original source:

Wojnarski M, Hanken Kurtz D (2016) Paperity Central: An Open Catalog of All Scholarly Literature. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8462. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8462

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Openly published Open Science Prize Grant Proposal builds on ContentMine and Hypothes.is to bridge scientists and facts

Public health emergencies such as the currently spreading Zika disease might be successfully necessitating open access for the available biomedical researches and their underlying data, yet filtering the right information, so that it lands in the hands of the right people, is what holds up professionals to bring the adequate measures about.

Submitted to the Open Science Prize contest, the present grant proposal, prepared with the joint efforts of scientists affiliated with Hypothes.is, ContentMine, University of Cambridge, Cottage Labs LLP and Imperial College of London, suggests a new scholarly assistant system, called amanuens.is, based on the existing ContentMine and Hypothes.is prototypes. Its aim is to combine machines and humans, so that mining critically important facts and making them available to the world can be made not only significantly faster, but also less costly. Through their publication in the open access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), the scientists, who are also well-known open access and open data proponents, are looking for further support, feedback and collaborations.

While Hypothes.is is a mixture of software and communities, which together annotate the available literature, ContentMine are building an open source pipeline to extract facts from scientific documents, thus making the literature review process cheaper, more rigorous, continuous and transparent. The role of amanuens.is is meant to bring these two systems together.

As a result, Hypothes.is is to display ContentMine facts as annotations on the online document, therefore increasing their visibility. In turn, the large Hypothes.is community, comprising users ranging from devoted and experienced Wikipedia editors to dedicated citizen scientists, would be able to provide manually their own annotations, which could be then fed back into the ContentMine facts store.

“Facts are important – but science is performed by people – so ContentMine are partnering with Hypothes.is to bring communities together around facts in the scholarly literature,” sums up Dr Peter Murray-Rust. “Through combining machines and humans in a tight, iterating, loop, amanuens.is will be able to mine critically important facts and make them available to the world.”

In their proposal, the authors give a hypothetical, yet foreseeable example with a Hypothes.is community, centered around research and discussions regarding a bacterium, already proven to restrain some mosquitoes from transmitting various viruses, and its potential use against Zika. There, amanuens.is downloads all open access papers on Zika from a multitude of sources within 3 minutes. In a matter of a couple of seconds a total of 123 files are downloaded. Then, amanuens.is delivers a data table of the extracted data, including species, human genes, DNA primers and top word frequencies.

Within the community and thanks to the literature, made available via ContentMine, the users would be able to collaborate and build on the existing research outcomes. As a result, it could take only fifteen minutes and a brief proposal to mobilise the related scholarly resources and test for Zika resistance in infected with the virus mosquitoes.

“Finding facts to finding people took 15 minutes and this is how modern collaborative science should work,” Prof Peter Murray-Rust says about the given example. “The people then create knowledge from the facts. The knowledge creates communities. The communities explore science- and people-based solutions.”

In conclusion, the proposal states that similarly to the content and software provided by ContentMine and Hypothes.is, the outputs produced by amanuens.is will also be openly available. All of its data and annotations are to be public domain under a CC0 waiver.

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Original source:

Martone M, Murray-Rust P, Molloy J, Arrow T, MacGillivray M, Kittel C, Kasberger S, Steel G, Oppenheim C, Ranganathan A, Tennant J, Udell J (2016) ContentMine/Hypothes.is Proposal.Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8424. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8424