Category Archives: oa.octopus

Octopus.ac One Year In

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“Octopus.ac launched almost a year ago, slightly quietly because we wanted to add features and smooth out wrinkles with our user groups before we were fully ready for the world. Now we’re coming to crunch point: we need early adopters to start using it. Because every publication in Octopus is linked to another, we ‘pre-seeded’ Octopus with research topics and problems to act as a kind of skeleton on which the living coral reef of publications can grow – but we need researchers’ help now to start publishing ‘real’ work on the platform.

As I talk to researchers about it, I find there are often three main reasons for hesitation. I hope that here I can address each one: …”

Octopus Author Guide

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“Octopus publications are not equivalent to journal articles or papers. Instead, there are 8 smaller publication types aligned with the publication process.

Think of Octopus like a ‘patent office’ where you can register all your work, including theories, data, and analyses. Whatever you publish should be the formal ‘version of record’, ready to be assessed by others and publicly recorded against your name and ORCID iD.Publishing on Octopus is quick and easy by design. Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started: …”

Octopus and ResearchEquals aim to break the publishing mould

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“Instead of fully fledged manuscripts, Octopus and ResearchEquals allow researchers to publish individual units of research — from research questions and hypotheses to code, multimedia and presentations. The concept is called modular publishing, and both sites hope to push academics to think beyond conventional publications as the primary unit of scholarly research by breaking the research cycle into pieces….”

Product Manager – Octopus

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“You will be part of the Digital resources team that delivers services that support the procurement, licensing, management, discovery and use of content and software for UK further education, higher education and research. Our work areas are: licensing (content and software), open research, content and discovery.

This is an exciting opportunity to develop a new, innovative open research product called Octopus. Octopus will allow researchers to publish their work for free at any stage in the research process. We are looking to recruit a product manager who is driven by the principles of open research and has the skills required to deliver this product to researchers and to grow a user base.
In the first year of the role, you will work cross-functionally to guide Octopus, an innovative research publication platform, from its launch to growing a user base and developing a sustainability plan. Developed by Dr Alexandra Freeman, Octopus breaks down the publication of scientific research into eight elements, unlike a traditional journal article.

The platform is free for researchers to publish their work, free for anyone to read and 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….”

Product Manager – Octopus

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“You will be part of the Digital resources team that delivers services that support the procurement, licensing, management, discovery and use of content and software for UK further education, higher education and research. Our work areas are: licensing (content and software), open research, content and discovery.

This is an exciting opportunity to develop a new, innovative open research product called Octopus. Octopus will allow researchers to publish their work for free at any stage in the research process. We are looking to recruit a product manager who is driven by the principles of open research and has the skills required to deliver this product to researchers and to grow a user base.
In the first year of the role, you will work cross-functionally to guide Octopus, an innovative research publication platform, from its launch to growing a user base and developing a sustainability plan. Developed by Dr Alexandra Freeman, Octopus breaks down the publication of scientific research into eight elements, unlike a traditional journal article.

The platform is free for researchers to publish their work, free for anyone to read and 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….”

Octopus: The New Primary Research Record for Science

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“Octopus is a new platform, launching in spring 2022, which is designed to be the new primary research record for science. Instead of being a platform for the publication of papers, it is designed for easy and rapid sharing and assessing of work, in smaller units. Octopus will be where researchers can record every piece of work that they have done, as they do it, to assert their priority and for it to be assessed and critiqued by their peers. Octopus has a unique structure to encourage a collaborative approach to the scientific process, with publications building on each other over time, regardless of authorship. In this talk, its creator will explain more about how it will work, and why it was designed the way it was.”

Octopus: creating a new primary research record for science | Jisc

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“Octopus will create a new ‘primary research record’ for recording and appraising research ‘as it happens’.

It breaks down the publication of scientific research into eight elements, unlike a traditional journal article.

The eight elements are:

Problem
Hypothesis/rationale
Methods/protocol
Data/results
Analysis
Interpretation
Real-world implementation
Peer review

These elements will be linked together 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.

This will encourage a new culture of collaboration, constructive critique and fast sharing of work by resetting the incentive structure in research to reward best practice in every aspect of the scientific process.

The platform will be free for researchers to publish their work, free for anyone to read and embeds the principles of openness and transparency throughout….”

The launch of Octopus: the new primary research record | 29 June 2022

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“We need to break down the barriers that block access to research, to remove the hierarchies and change the incentives that drive research in the wrong directions. Octopus sets out to do all of this.

By becoming the official and global primary research record, existing only to serve the needs of the research community, it is designed purely to incentivise the highest standards of research practice and culture.

Using Octopus, researchers can read, review and register ideas and findings – freely and immediately publishing their work in full detail, and in an open and transparent way and gaining the credit for it. Read more about the project.

In August 2021 Octopus Community Interest Company (CIC), in collaboration with Jisc, received £650,000 from Research England’s emerging priorities fund to support the technical development required to move Octopus from a prototype to a global service….”

Product Manager – Octopus

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“This is an exciting opportunity to develop a new, innovative open research product called Octopus. Octopus will allow researchers to publish their work for free at any stage in the research process. We are looking recruit a product manager who is driven by the principles of open research and has the skills required to deliver this product to researchers and to grow a user base….”

This week is ‘Peer Review Week’ – a time to ‘celebrate’ that aspect of scientific publishing that academia loves to hate. – Research

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“Imagine if every statistical analysis was accompanied by comments from a professional statistician; if every method described had been critiqued by a methodological expert; if interpretations could be published of the same analysis from a wide variety of people with different training, backgrounds or experience. How much richer would the research record be? How much more useful than each of us only passing our own personal judgement on each article, bounded by our own inevitably narrow experience, and unshared with others?

This was all part of my thinking when coming up with Octopus, the platform that is designed to be the new, digital-first primary research record for scientific work….”

“Positively Disrupt(ing) Research Culture for the Better”: An Interview with Alexandra Freeman of Octopus – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“In early August, it was announced that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) would provide significant funding for a new open publishing platform. Called Octopus, this initiative is not yet fully launched, but when it is it plans to “provide a new ‘primary research record’ for recording and appraising research “as it happens’”; UKRI calls Octopus “a ground-breaking global service which could positively disrupt research culture for the better.” I reached out to Octopus’s founder, Dr. Alexandra Freeman, to ask some questions about Octopus and its plans for the future….”

David Worlock | Developing digital strategies for the information marketplace | Supporting the migration of information providers and content players into the networked services world of the future.

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“If STM publishers were successful in going [to fee-based gold] Open Access , and supporting a creator-pays business model , how will they cope with the next migration , if that is towards Open Platform , and funder pays in a context that does not really seem to require publishers in quite the same way at all…

But the really interesting part of the [Octopus] proposal is the break-up of the article itself . Dr Freeman sees it as dividing into eight different segments , each of them appearing on the platform as soon as they are ready , and thus each element being susceptible to review at that point . Her eight sections are :  Problem ; Hypothesis; Methodology/Protocol ; Data/Results ;Analysis; Interpretation : Real-world Implications ; Peer Review. It will be seen that the thinking leans towards the Open Science insistence in separating the publication of the first three elements in time prior to results being available . It also encompasses another strand of funder thinking – all the work that has been accepted and funded , through increasingly expensive selection processes , should subsequently appear on a platform and be peer-reviewed. The process of publisher/editor selection may not now be wanted on board ….”

Funding agreed for a platform that will change research culture – UKRI

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“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’….”