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DigitalOcean: building a platform for scientific collaboration and social and media sharing on the Drupal content management system

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Abstract

The DigitalOcean (DO) Project is designed to bring essential Web 2.0 capabilities to an open-source software platform built for scientific collaboration and publishing. The DO platform is being built using the Drupal content management system (CMS). The following are some of the core features of the proposed platform: social networking, media/data sharing/publishing, and collaboration spaces for scientific virtual organizations (VO); active support for VO governance and reputation systems for members and objects; Creative Commons licensing, support for preprint archives and micro-articles, and; professional user-profiles that can be saved as well formatted biosketches. The DO platform serves as a collaboration environment for active research teams, a personal repository for individual researchers, an aggregation/filter for science information, and a scientific publishing tool. This article will outline the history and goals of the DO Project, the core technology concerns and solutions, and the opportunities that this new platform will bring to scientists across the planet.

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Acknowledgements

To date, activities of the DigitalOcean project have been funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Outhink Media, Inc., the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the David & Diane Toole Foundation, the Toole Family Foundation, Oracle, Inc., Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Google, Inc., with other contributions from UC Santa Barbara (especially the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management) and the New Media Research Institute. The Drupal code base is in active development and will be made available (most likely on Github) and seeded back into Drupal open-source repositories.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New Media Research Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Bruce Caron

  2. Outhink, Inc, San Mateo, CA, USA

    Dave Toole

  3. San Francisco, CA, USA

    Paul Wicks

  4. Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

    Steve Miller

Authors
  1. Bruce Caron
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  2. Dave Toole
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  3. Paul Wicks
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  4. Steve Miller
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bruce Caron.

Additional information

Communicated by: R. Ramachandran

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Caron, B., Toole, D., Wicks, P. et al. DigitalOcean: building a platform for scientific collaboration and social and media sharing on the Drupal content management system. Earth Sci Inform 4, 191–196 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-011-0090-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-011-0090-7

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