Provide a summary of your strategy for implementing and managing the CS.
Scholarship advances by open exchange of ideas and evidence. A substantial portion of this exchange occurs via publication of journal articles following peer review. Preprints provide a means of accelerating scholarly communication by sharing manuscripts prior to formal peer review. Preprints are well established in some fields such as physics and economics, and just emerging in other fields such as biology and chemistry. Effective expansion of preprints requires modern, open infrastructure to operate preprint services and facilitate deposit and discovery, and community-based governance to test innovations, share good practices, and establish norms and standards across scholarly domains.
We will create a life science preprints commons (hereafter “The Commons”) that meets and exceeds the requirements of ASAPbio RFA for a central service. This open infrastructure will make preprints from any service easy to discover, access, and deposit through a single interface. The Commons will be governed by ASAPbio’s Governing Board; the service providers will be the technical partner to that governing board.
COS established OSF Preprints as an interface to the OSF--an open scholarly commons for data and workflow management archiving and sharing. OSF Preprints aggregates search across existing preprint services (11 preprint services 2M preprints as of April 2017) using SHARE another COS-led consortium project. Groups can operate branded interfaces and aggregators for their own communities. Five are in production and seven will launch soon including partnerships with funding organizations (e.g. Mind & Life Institute) and consortia (e.g. NELLCO Law Library Consortium).
A collaborative team from Manuscripts Authorea and others are prepared to contribute as a technical partner for document conversion. Existing services interoperate with DOCX HTML Markdown and JATS XML amongst other formats. The team will offer and extend open structured document editing and conversion technologies.
The Commons will connect preprint services in a community-based model. For the typical user discovery interface The Commons will facilitate discovery of preprints and guide users to engage with the preprint on that service. For preservation and data mining research applications The Commons will store full-text of preprints that qualify for storage. This community-centered model is illustrated with 12 attached letters of support from preprint services: arXiv, bioRxiv, AgriXiv, MarXiv, MindrXiv, PaleorXiv, BITSS, SocArXiv, SciELO, PsyArXiv, engrXiv, and FocUS Archive.
Our approach achieves the benefits of interoperability, programmatic access, preservation, and discoverability via centralization and the benefits of innovation, independence, and sharing of best practices via decentralization. Standards and best practices are identified most efficiently by facilitating an open marketplace for innovation. Standards and best practices are adopted most effectively by facilitating collaboration among the community of stakeholders.
The Commons will be built on the OSF scholarly commons--modern extensible scalable public goods infrastructure that archives papers data protocols registrations and connects the research lifecycle. The commons is modular such that the underlying tools and services are independent of the interfaces. This fosters economy of scale and mutual benefits across stakeholder communities. Feature enhancements to The Commons will extend to the other services built on OSF (e.g. preprint services registries repositories research management). Simultaneously OSF’s rich services provide substantial added value to The Commons. For example the RFA requests integration between preprints and a data repository to encourage open data. OSF is a data archiving service but it is also a commons of repositories. Authors will be able to connect their preprints with data in general and domain-specific biomedical repositories. To illustrate we attach 15 letters of support from biomedical-relevant repositories: Dryad, Protein Data Bank, TalkBank, NIAGADS, NeuroMorpho, NAHDAP, ICPSR, Figshare, flybase, Mouse Phenome Database, Dataverse, Protocols, Sage Bionetworks (Synapse), DIP, and Vector Base. We will also work with NIH-hosted repositories (NIH staff cannot write letters of support).
The RFA priorities for open, free infrastructure are highly aligned with COS’s mission and approach. COS builds entirely free, open infrastructure to support the research lifecycle. COS services are built to scale, and already support preprints. We can deliver an initial version of The Commons immediately. Our highly skilled team will deliver rapid, incremental advancement of The Commons during the grant period.
The proposed budget anticipates consistent interest by the Governing Body (GB) in expanding features. As a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, we welcome regular budget negotiation and transparent accounting of the actual costs to run the service. We also propose a substantial marketing campaign to support adoption of preprints. This portion of the budget can be adjusted depending on delegation of responsibilities with ASAPbio.
The RFA goals for sustainability are perfectly aligned with COS’s model. The Commons infrastructure and content are public goods. COS is developing a sustainability model for the scholarly commons that will be elaborated and implemented during the grant period. The plan will ensure that the user public will always have free deposit and access to preprints. The long-term costs for The Commons will be substantially lower than other approaches because the scholarly commons aligns the interests of many stakeholder communities with shared tools.