Technical Workshop (2016)

The report from the workshop has been published (pdf archived 2/1/2017)

ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in biology) will host a Preprint Service Technical Workshop at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA on Tuesday, August 30, 2016. This one day meeting will be a gathering of technical representatives from existing preprint servers, repositories, aggregators, libraries, and other services.

As a starting premise for this meeting, we are envisioning the development of a new Central Preprint Service for biology that could aggregate content from multiple existing servers and provide valuable discovery and data mining services for scientists, intake servers, and other innovators who might want to develop new services. The output of the meeting, together with community feedback, will inform a proposal to a consortium of interested funders, which may result in a Request for Information (RFI) and a subsequent funding opportunity.

Proposed service

We are requesting community feedback on the Central Service model documents listed below:

• Summary: Background and a draft model
• Appendix 1: Rationale for a Central Service
• Appendix 2: Current feedback on Central Service features

Meeting information

• Background
• Agenda (with links to documents for live note-taking)
• Attendees

Video recordings by session

• Introduction to ASAPbio (Ron Vale)
• Introduction to the Academy (John Randell)
• What biologists want from preprints (James Fraser)
• Goals of the Technical Workshop (Jessica Polka)
  • Slides
• Meeting participant introductions (roundtable)
• Breakout session 1A
• Report back from breakout sessions 1A
  • Notes: Architecture, APIs, metadata, and file formats of existing preprint servers/platforms/journals)
• Report back from breakout session 1B
  • Notes:  Capabilities of document conversion services (.doc or latex to .xml/.html)
• Breakout session 2A
• Report back from breakout session 2A
  • Notes: Tools for automated screening – plagiarism, image manipulation, author authentication
• Report back from breakout session 2B
  • Notes: Interfaces and approaches for human moderation and curation
• Breakout session 3A
• Report back from breakout session 3A
  • Notes: Data storage models (and linking to external datasets)
• Report back from breakout session 3B
  • Notes: Identifiers, versioning, linking (including to journal publications)
• Breakout session 4A
• Report back from breakout session 4A
  • Notes: Search and bibliometrics tools; syndicating content to external search tools
• Report back from breakout session 4B
  • Notes: Enabling access by individuals, journal content management systems, and others
• Summary and closing thoughts (roundtable)