Scholarly communication and the web  (Page 2/4)

myExperiment has focused on support for sharing pieces of research method, such as scientific workflows and experimental plans, in order to address a specific need in the research community in both conducting research and training researchers. Experimental plans, standard operating procedures and laboratory protocols are descriptions of the steps of a research process, commonly undertaken manually. Scientific workflows are one of the most recent forms of scientific digital methods, and one that has gained popularity and adoption in a short time – they represent the methods component of modern in silico science and are valuable and important scholarly assets in their own right. Repositories often emphasise curation of data, but in digital research the curation of the process around that data is equally important – methods are crucial intellectual assets of the research life cycle whose stewardship is often neglected (Goble and De Roure 2008), and by focusing on methods, myExperiment provides a mechanism for expert and community curation of process in a rapidly changing landscape.

While it shares many characteristics with other Web 2.0 sites, myExperiment’s distinctive features to meet the needs of its research user base include support for credit, attributions and licencing, fine control over privacy, a federation model and the ability to execute workflows. Hence myExperiment has demonstrated the success of blending modern social curation methods (social tagging, crowd sourcing) with the demands of researchers sharing hard-won intellectual assets and research works within the scholarly communication lifecycle.

Research objects

The Web 2 design patterns (O’Reilly 2005) tell us “Data is the next Intel Inside. Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore for competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.” Significantly, myExperiment also recognises that a workflow can be enriched as a sharable item by bundling it with some other pieces which make up the “experiment”. Hence myExperiment supports aggregations of items stored in the myExperiment repository as well as elsewhere. These are called “packs”, and while a pack might aggregate external content stored in multiple specialised repositories for particular content types, the pack itself is a single entity which can be tagged, reviewed, published, shared etc. For example, a pack might correspond to an experiment, containing input and output data, the experimental plan, associated publications and presentations, enabling that experiment to be shared. Another example is a pack containing all the evidence corresponding to a particular decision as part of the record of the research process. Packs are described using the Open Archives Initiative’s Object Reuse and Exchange representation which is based on RDF graphs and was specifically designed with this form of aggregation in mind (Van de Sompel 2009).

While some publishers are looking at how to augment papers with supplemental materials, raising concerns about peer-review and about decay, myExperiment is tackling this from first principles by starting with the digital artefacts and asking “what is the research object that researchers will share in the future?” These Research Objects have important properties: