Nodes Beta Release: The Next Generation of Scientific Publishing
We are thrilled to launch the Nodes open Beta
Nodes is a next-generation open-science solution for publishing and managing manuscripts, data, code, and all other artefacts of research. You can think of Nodes as the place where all the pieces of your work become connected into a canvas that elevates your research.
Our vision is to enable open, composable, and verifiable research
Nodes has many exciting technological innovations under the hood, including persistent identifiers that are immune to content drift and link rot, an open-state repository that makes all scientific content accessible to all humans and machines, and entirely novel ways for scientists, funders, and the public to interact with research.
The goal of Nodes is to elevate scientists and their research
Nodes is an interface for researchers to publish and interact with primary research outputs in the form of research objects. Research objects combine manuscripts, data, code, peer-review reports, community activity, inference APIs, and so much more into a single, rich, fully contextualized digital publication.
What’s included in Nodes open beta?
Create research objects from a component library that lets you upload your manuscripts, code, data, and more.
Annotate manuscripts to easily connect data, code and other artefacts directly into your figures and text. Nodes makes it easy to create reproducible research.
Publish on a prototype decentralized repository (”open state repository”) that stores research outputs, preserves content integrity, and provides irrevocable accessibility.
Send programs over to the data (edge computing) or import artefacts locally into your integrated development environment (IDE).
What’s coming next?
A powerful web-based code execution environment to reproduce results and interact with code and data directly into your browser.
Customize your component libraries and metadata schema to make Nodes optimally machine-readable and adapted to the needs of different scientific communities.
Overlay journals: Git primitives are on their way. Fork nodes, add peer-review commentary, and transact on knowledge with verifiable attestations.
Add videos, for example, to show and demonstrate laboratory procedures or explainers.
Scientists need better tools to elevate their research
Scientists are our world’s most important creators, yet on many levels remain the most underserved. Designers have Figma and developers have Github, but scientists must struggle with confusing manuscript submission systems that from a bygone era.
The creator experience of scientists has been neglected for too long
To make matters worse, this process is becoming increasingly more complex due to well-intentioned requirements for researchers to share their artefacts, create machine-readable metadata, fill in checklists, and comply with various mandates. The result is cognitive overload, inefficiency, and pain for all parties involved.
We need an open protocol to store, preserve, access, and operate on FAIR digital objects
The scientific record is far from the ideals set forth by the FAIR principles, and even further away from an Internet for FAIR digital objects. Inconsistent resolution, content drift, link rot, expensive maintenance, and poor metadata are well-documented problems in the industry. As signatories to the Leiden declaration on Fair Digital Objects, DeSci Labs recognizes that there is an urgent need to build FAIR-enabling infrastructure to help us preserve and elevate the quality, interoperability, and integrity of the scientific record.
Nodes is an interface for scientists to create interoperable research objects that are FAIR enabling by design. These research objects are stored, preserved, accessed, and operated upon via an open-state repository.
FAIR will have succeeded when scientists no longer need to know that they are doing it, it just happens
Scientists today have little to no control over how their research artefacts are served and made findable and creditable. As scientists, we must follow complex flowcharts to share our data, code, and other artefacts. We must visit all corners of the web to upload fragments of our research and gather brittle links. In the end, we get served solitary PDFs or cluttered HTML webpages with links to artefacts that are often buried and suffer from link rot, if they exist at all. These are just a few of the obstacles that researchers face in their journey to create reproducible and verifiable research. Poor creator experience contributes to bad incentives. It shouldn’t be this way.
Can we build a better interface to publish new knowledge?
Just as developers and designers have collaborative apps that unlocked huge productivity gains, could scientists be provided with the means to collaborate on awe-inspiring FAIR research objects that contain interactive manuscripts, reproducible code capsules, and powerful methods to produce new discoveries with the data that they contain? We believe the answer is yes.
We will not have succeeded until we provide a radically better content experience over preprint platforms
Preprint platforms took off because they created incentive alignment: faster credit accrual mechanisms and immediate access to the latest research. The next step is to extend the definition, and subsequent recognition, of primary research outputs beyond the manuscript. For this, we must simplify the creation process of verifiable research, and provide immediate benefits to researchers by making powerful computational methods to operate on these research objects available.
Why now?
We are witnessing a rare moment in history. On one side, funders are mandating open access to peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and scientific data while simultaneously emphasizing machine readability and interoperability. On the other side, the advent of AI and decentralized web technologies provide novel affordances that can develop into a substrate for an Internet of FAIR digital research objects. This is a rare conjunction of policy and technology: top-down mandates meet bottom-up technological innovations.
At the same time, there is a rare window of incentive alignment: scientific communities need better tools along with computing capabilities and data storage to facilitate discoveries. Indexers such as Web of Science, Dimension, and Scopus need high-quality data such as new forms of citations and FAIR data reuse. Editors of scientific journals and conference chairs increasingly care about reproducibility and seek assurance that data, code, and other artefacts are available with submissions. Publishers are rethinking their IT requirements from first principles. Funders are seeking quality markers such as reproducibility, traceability, and long-term safeguards of FAIR research outputs on a truly open infrastructure. All of this is creating a strategic opportunity for culture change at large.
Try Nodes and tell us what you think!
Nodes is DeSci Labs’ first step to radically improve the openness and quality of the scientific record. We invite all scientists to try it out. Take a look at our documentation and our FAQ, experiment with Nodes, and give us feedback via the button at the bottom right corner of Nodes. Tell us what you like and what you don’t. If you encounter a bug, miss a feature, or have an idea of how we can make Nodes better, please let us know.