Developing a workspace for authentic collaboration requires infrastructure that accommodates profiles of team members and their projects and resources, as well as enables posting, tracking, discussing and revising their incremental results. Accessory tools are also needed to track and measure open collaborative activities in order to establish rewards that incentivize these behaviors.

Rapid Science assisted in strategizing and implementing, with consulting partner Stratos (Strategies for Open Science), a “hub” for conducting open research by 600+ grantees of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) – an initiative dedicated to accelerating the pace of discovery in basic biology through transparency and open practices.

For this project, Stratos conceived and developed a customizable Research Outputs Management System (ROMS) to track, tag, and standardize outputs (see sketch below). The schema is an extensible framework to ID and describe research outputs regardless of where they are stored. It requires persistent identifiers and adequate metadata to ensure all outputs are discoverable, including data, code, protocols, and tangible materials.

In addition to gathering outputs with persistent identifiers, the ROMS can monitor open and collaborative behaviors; together these data serve a variety of purposes as shown below.

Work on the ROMS and ASAP hub led to the founding of Incentivizing Collaborative & Open Research (ICOR), a community-based organization dedicated to formulating and implementing practical approaches toward a research culture of openness and trust. As custom ROMS and hubs are being developed for other research initiatives, ICOR will work with them to develop standards and best practices.

In earlier work, Rapid Science developed the collaborative workspace Sarcoma Central for clinical researchers to discuss outcomes of clinical trials and insights from their practices. See below a demo showcasing the communication tools in the pilot workspace.