inseri.swiss – connecting data repositories, research methods, and researchers
inseri core is a WordPress plugin developed as part of inseri.swiss swissuniversities project – Programme Open Science.
inseri core introduces scientific and interactive Gutenberg blocks to facilitate open science.
It enables interactive and executable online content. There are two perspectives:
- as a visitor: try our Showcase section. You will become familiar with the experience that you can also provide to your page visitors;
- as an editor: install inseri-core plugin to your website, or try out our plugin in your inseri Playground (don’t hesitate to consult our Documentation). You will become familiar with the experience of building interactive and executable online content.
Do you want to be an early adopter? Feel free to contact us.
Vision
inseri enables scholars to design and publish interactive and executable online content without requiring web development skills. So that they can publish with ease the research findings in an open, citable and interactive way for effortless reuse by any researcher or the general public. Through interactivity, everyone is encouraged to edit the parameters, use own data, or reuse publicly published data to explore the research findings.
As a result inseri facilitates open access and open science communication.
inseri name comes from the Latin insero which means to sow, to plant but also to insert.
Description
“inseri.swiss” targets the large unsaturated demand for a service that enables the national and also the international academic research communities to publish scientific web applications online in an open, executable and citable way for the effortless re-use by any researcher. In addition, this project enables users to combine published software of various sorts alongside interfaces to global data repositories, which can all be performed using a web-based graphical user interface.
The existing inseri technology has been developed by the University of Zurich, the University of Basel and the University of Bern. It was originally created for historical-critical editions as part of the NIE-INE project and provides the base functionality needed to build up such an online publishing environment for other scientific disciplines. In tandem with conventional publications (e.g., pdf files), a service based on inseri will simplify the publishing of and the open access to alternative types of online content.
When the Science IT unit of the University of Zurich began offering internal services using the inseri technology, a Swiss-wide demand quickly evolved. Here we propose to set up a national service “inseri.swiss” for the online publishing of scientific software in an open, executable and citable way. The proposed project includes the development of both a business plan and the necessary software extensions to run an inseri.swiss service sustainably. Furthermore, the project includes the creation of a production environment that allows the shared service to be operated and maintained in a reliable, future-proof way that scales based on demand.
inseri.swiss has the potential to provide an invaluable resource to researchers who would like to publish and re-use online research methods and it strives for becoming a sustainable, long-term national and international service.
Use cases
inseri is targeting four use cases:
- Creation of own website for research output to complement traditional research output (PDF publication) with a Web format
- Interactive online tool via visualisation components that allow the reuse also with own data
- Data reuse and integration with data sources such that one can reuse open published data with the previously published online tools
- Data analysis and simulation without the need to set up the computational environment for runnable and reusable components without going into the details of the programming language used for the analysis
Roadmap
In order to support our vision we plan to enhance WordPress with the following capabilities:
- ✅ Interactive and executable blocks driven by research use cases. See the available inseri core blocks and the corresponding documentation.
- ✅ Data flow between the inseri compatible blocks (see Data Flow)
- ✅ Open and Citable content (see here). Persistent Identifier and Long Term Storage via a data repository (e.g., Zenodo)
- ✅ Restore state (see Share block) to share and reproduce a given selection.
For more details please see our backlog and the planned GitHub Milestones.
If you are new to WordPress please see WordPress Roadmap.