Researchers are invited to attend the online launch of the groundbreaking platform Octopus on 29 June 2022. Octopus aims to enable fast, free, and fair publishing of research that is open to all. The emphasis is on speed, openness, fairness, and ease of use, to prioritise the pure, intrinsic quality of research.
Octopus will provide a primary research record for publishing and research as it happens. It will offer the research community a place to record full details of ideas, methods, data, and analyses to be peer-reviewed and assessed for quality. Octopus will allow faster results sharing with credit given to individual work at all stages of the research process – including peer review.
Unlike a traditional research-publishing model, Octopus breaks down research publication into eight smaller modules or elements: Problem; Hypothesis/theoretical rationale; Methods/protocol ; Data/results; Analysis; Interpretation; Real-world implementation ; and Peer review. These elements are linked together to form branching chains, but each can be authored by different people.
Last year, Octopus Publishing Community Interest Company (CIC) was awarded £650,000 funding over three years in collaboration with Jisc from Research England’s emerging priorities fund. This funding was for technical development required to move Octopus from a prototype to a global service. Furthermore, thanks to the funding from UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) and the platform's design, the research is free to read and free for researchers to publish.
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