Announcing Aperture - the OHBM Publishing Platform

BY NIKOLA STIKOV AND JEAN-BAPTISTE POLINE
(IN CONSULTATION WITH THE OHBM PUBLISHING INITIATIVE COMMITTEE)

The current academic publishing norms impose many constraints on how and what we publish without fully embracing the new web-enabled dynamics. The emergence of the internet as the de facto publication medium, and the availability of open source technologies for handling the hosting and peer review process, have made it possible for organizations such as OHBM to experiment with innovative publishing platforms and to host high-quality research objects while promoting reproducible and open science.

With Aperture, OHBM plans to open up to a more diverse approach in communicating academic research, bringing transparency and interactivity to the publishing process. While initially our focus will be on reviews, tutorials and educational materials, we foresee using this format to incorporate computational notebooks, interactive plots, software, data, and post-publication peer-review to create living, reusable and reproducible research objects. We hope to have a beta version of Aperture in time for the Rome meeting in 2019.

Aperture workflow meeting with Adam Hyde from the Coko Foundation.

Over the past year, members of The OHBM Publishing Initiative Committee (TOPIC) have been meeting with representatives of publishing companies and funding agencies to come up with a workflow that plays to our strengths as leaders in the field of open neuroimaging. We are now working closely with the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko) to put together a publishing workflow, and we are grateful to the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) for providing generous support for the development of Aperture. 

Coko has extensive experience developing open source publishing components, some of which are used by Elife and other open-access publishers. Their framework could give the Open Science SIG and the broader OHBM community the opportunity to participate in the construction of Aperture. We look forward to establishing even more collaborations with like-minded partners.

The roadmap of The OHBM Publishing Initiative Committee (TOPIC) proposed to Council in late 2017.

Most importantly, we want to hear from our members! For that purpose, we invite you all to attend the Publishing Round Table, to be held at the annual meeting in Singapore on Monday June 18 at noon (Room: 324-326). Please join us for what we hope will be a fruitful discussion about the future of Aperture!