(6 Aug 2021) Research England grants £650,000 to help build Octopus into a new global service for scholarly communication.
Funding has been agreed to help develop a ground-breaking global service which could positively disrupt research culture for the better.
Announced today by the science minister, Amanda Solloway, Octopus Publishing Community Interest Company (CIC), in collaboration with Jisc, will receive £650,000 over three years from Research England’s emerging priorities fund.
The money will support development of a new platform for the scientific community. Called Octopus, it will provide a new ‘primary research record’ for recording and appraising research ‘as it happens’.
Filtering by elements
Developed by Dr Alexandra Freeman, Octopus breaks down the publication of scientific research into eight elements, unlike a traditional journal article.
The eight elements are:
- problem
- hypothesis or rationale
- methods or protocol
- data or results
- analysis
- interpretation
- real-world implementation
- peer review.
Elements are linked together on Octopus, to form chains of collaborative work. These smaller units of publication encourage faster sharing, and credit can be given to individual work at all stages of the research process, including peer review.
The platform:
- is free for researchers to publish their work
- is free for anyone to read
- embeds the principles of openness and transparency throughout.
Its aim is to reset the incentive structure in research to reward best practice in every aspect of the scientific process.
Changing the publication landscape
Research England’s director of research, Steven Hill, said: “The funding to support Octopus aligns with Research England’s strong commitment to open research and the government’s people and culture strategy. 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.”
Leveraging technology
Director of open research services, at Jisc, Liz Bal, said: “The vision for Octopus is strongly aligned with Jisc’s overall mission in leveraging technology to improve research. Open by design, Octopus represents an entirely new publishing model, with the potential to transform research communication and research culture. Our goal for Octopus is that it is driven by the needs of the global research community and that the underlying technology and processes are open, robust and scalable.”
Fast and easy sharing
Director of Octopus, Dr Alexandra Freeman, said: “My hope for Octopus is that it breaks down barriers to access 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. 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-19 research shouldn’t be the exception. All research should be this transparent, and freely available to all.”
The design emphasis will be on speed and ease of use, both for authors to share their own work and to search for relevant work of others.
Research England’s funding will support the technical development required to move the experimental Octopus tool from a prototype to an active service that’s available worldwide.
It will also support:
- marketing and outreach
- a programme of evaluation and user research
- work to develop a sustainable model for Octopus in the long-term.
The announcement is here.
