[science-at] Call for Collaborators: Open Science Prize Project on Open Discovery

[Peter Kraker]

= Please excuse cross-posting =

Dear all,

I am currently preparing a proposal for the Open Science Prize 
(http://openscienceprize.org) in the field of open discovery, and I am 
looking for motivated collaborators who want to join the project and 
change the way we do discovery. Here is the current summary:

"Discovery is an essential task for every researcher, especially in 
dynamic research fields such as biomedicine. Currently, however, there 
are only a limited number of tools that can be used by a mainstream 
audience.We propose BLAZE, an open discovery tool that goes far beyond 
the functionality of search engines and social reading lists. The tool 
builds on Pubmed Central and other open content sources and will provide 
topical maps for a given list of papers, e.g. a search result or a 
journal volume. The maps are created automatically using fulltexts to 
calculate similarities and derive topical structures among papers. 
Furthermore, they will be enriched with features that are extracted from 
the papers (e.g. all papers with the same species are highlighted). 
BLAZE will enable users to do their discovery in a single interface. 
Users can interact with the maps, explore different topical areas, 
filter and read individual papers in the same interface. An edit mode 
will provided for users to make changes to the maps and to introduce new 
papers and topical areas. Users can openly share maps with others and 
export the structure in various open formats. BLAZE will be based on the 
existing open source visualization Head Start 
(http://github.com/pkraker/Headstart), and make extensive use of the 
digital open science ecosystem, including, but not limited to, open 
content, content mining services, open source solutions, and open 
metrics data. With this tool, we want to show the potential of open 
science for innovation in scholarly communication and discovery. In 
addition, we believe that this tool will increase the visibility of and 
awareness for open content and open science in general."

A first draft is also available: 
https://github.com/pkraker/open-discovery/blob/master/proposal.md

I am looking for backend and frontend web developers who code in 
JavaScript and/or PHP and R. We will be extending an existing tool for 
creating web-based knowledge domain visualizations that uses D3.js 
(http://d3js.org) on the frontend, and R content mining packages on the 
backend, in particular rOpenSci (https://ropensci.org/) and tm 
(https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tm/index.html), so you should 
have experience with at least one of these libraries. A background in 
biomed would be nice but it’s not mandatory.

Everything about this project will be open: we will prepare the proposal 
in the open, the development will take place on a public Github 
repository, and all project outputs will be published under an open license.

So if you want to join the project and create an awesome open science 
tool together with me, please send an e-mail to opendiscovery at gmx.at, 
outlining which part of the project interests you most, what you’d be 
able to contribute and how many hours you could devote to the project 
over the coming months. Please also include a link to your Github 
repository. It would be great if you could let me know whether you are a 
citizen of, or permanent resident in, the United States (US), as we will 
need to have at least one team member who satisfies this criterion. I am 
looking forward to your messages!

Best,
Peter

-- 
Vienna, Austria
http://science20.wordpress.com

Twitter: @PeterKraker
Github: @pkraker