Octopus is the new way to publish your scientific ideas, findings and research. Designed to replace journals and papers, Octopus is free to use and gets your work out there much more quickly, to a wider audience and ensures you get maximum credit for the work you do, whether that’s coming up with hypotheses, designing protocols, collecting data, doing analyses or writing reviews.
These principles underlie the design of Octopus: a new way to share scientific work that recognises and rewards good practice, and serves the needs of both scientists and science itself.
The current working version of Octopus is available online at beta.science-octopus.org and runs code from master branch in this repository.
For more information about the project, please see the official website.
In Octopus you publish work in smaller units than a "paper".
You can write and share one of 8 kinds of publication (though we are building the infrastructure to support custom types for different fields and research types):
- Problem – a neatly defined scientific problem
- Hypothesis – an original hypothesis relating to an existing published Problem
- Method/Protocol – a practical method of testing an existing published Hypothesis
- Data/Results – raw data or summarised results collected according to an existing published Method (can be linked to a data repository)
- Analysis – a statistical or thematic analysis of existing published Data or Results
- Interpretation – a discussion around an existing published Analysis
- Translation/Application – ‘real world’ applications arising from an existing published Interpretation
- Review – a considered, detailed review of any of the above kinds of publication
Every publication in Octopus must be linked to another existing publication in order to form ordered chains.
Only Problems and Reviews can be linked to any of the first publication types – others must be linked only to a type directly above them in the "chain".
Anyone can read anything on Octopus. Those logged in with an ORCID can write and rate publications.
Every publication you write (including reviews) can be rated by others, and these will add to your individual page which is available for all individuals, institutions and funding bodies to see. Publishing quickly and well, and good collaborative reviewing is therefore rewarded.
Octopus comprises a Node.js backend and a React frontend.
Install dependencies
To get started, you need to install the dependencies using npm:
npm ci
Start the app locally
Once they have been installed you can start both the backend and the frontend in development mode with this command:
npm run dev
It's equivalent to running npm run ui:dev and npm run api:dev.
Start API
To run the backend API server on port 3001, simply:
npm run api
Compile and start UI
And to compile the frontend app in release mode:
npm run ui:build
Then you can start the frontend app server on port 3000 with:
npm run ui
Run migrations
To run migrations you'll need to pass a full PostgreSQL database URL:
DATABASE_URL=postgres://username:password@localhost:5432/octopus-web-db npm run migrate up
Contributions to this codebase are welcomed. Please send your code as a pull request.
Also, please ensure that all JS code is formatted using prettier.
Octopus is freely licensed under the MIT license, a copy of which can be found in the LICENSE file, along with a list of copyright holders.
However, Octopus remains a trademark and any use must not be infringing.