Scheduled to be launched on Wednesday, Octopus is a research publication platform that is advertised as "fast, free and fair". "Octopus is designed to replace journals as the primary research record, allowing journals to concentrate on editorialising primary research and disseminating it in a suitable form to their specific readerships." I've tried it out a bit and even more to the point, Octopus is very structured, breaking down research publications into eight categories: problems, hypotheses, methods, results and data, analysis, interpretation, application, and (peer) review. Contributions to any of these need to be linked to others that already exist. "Publications therefore form branching chains of work, each following on from the other, and clustered under 'problems'." Contributors are linked by their ORCID identities and free to add to the chain. Here's an example of a problem I added to the dummy version being tested. I find the approach at once both constraining and liberating. Why do I have to start with problems? And I worry about things like duplication, sharability, and more (so much more). Is is centralized? Can we fork things? Is there an API? Can we syndicate? But I applaud the experiment.
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