UK funds ‘as it happens’ research publishing platform

The UK is to fund the development of a new publishing platform which will break down traditional scientific outputs into up-to-the-minute chunks.

Octopus, which is receiving £650,000 from Research England, aims to provide a new “primary research record” for recording scholarship “as it happens”.

Unlike traditional journal articles, Octopus will divide research projects into eight elements: problem, hypothesis/rationale, methods/protocol, data/results, analysis, interpretation, real-world implementation, and peer review.

These elements can then be linked together to form “chains” of collaborative work. Octopus, which is led by Alexandra Freeman, executive director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, said that having smaller units of publication would “encourage faster sharing” and allow credit to be given “to individual work at all stages of the research process, including peer review”.

The platform will be free for researchers to use, and all material that is uploaded will be free to read.

“My hope for Octopus is that it breaks down barriers to access to scientific research, helps remove hierarchies and the culture problems that those cause, and encourages a new culture of collaboration, constructive critique and fast sharing of work,” Dr Freeman said.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has shown not only how important fast and open publication of research is, but also what can be achieved when the scientific community work together towards a common goal. Covid research shouldn’t be the exception – all research should be this transparent, and freely available to all.”

Octopus is being developed by an Octopus Publishing Community Interest Company, in collaboration with sector technology body Jisc.

Research England’s funding will support the technical development required to turn the experimental Octopus platform from a prototype to a service that is available worldwide. It will also support marketing, evaluation, and “work to develop a sustainable model for Octopus in the long-term”.

“There is real potential for this service to positively disrupt the publication landscape and provide a tool for the research community, which is owned by the community,” said Steven Hill, director of research at Research England.

The move comes amid a growing trend of researchers preregistering their intended research goals prior to starting experiments, in response to concerns about alarming rates of false positive results and the potential for needless duplication of effort by scholars unknowingly tackling the same problem.

As long ago as 2015, Sir Mark Walport, who was then the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, suggested that scientists may in future communicate their results through “evolving manuscripts” that are updated continually over a working life.

chris.havergal@timeshighereducation.com