OR2012 Developer Challenge: Inspirational Ideas

Jul 11, 2012 by kpitkin

Our OR2012 Developer Challenge attracted a number of interesting ideas and suggestions for developers to take forward.

Entries for the Developer Challenge have now closed, but if you are a developer and you’re looking for ideas to solve that would make the world of open repositories a better place, here are a few for you to chew over…

Idea 1

Could we have a widget/dashboard for an EPrints repository [which may be part of MePrints or a wholly separate plugin] which could pull together information for an author/depositor about their publications profile in the repository, ideally visually (graph?) so for instance the total number of papers, the percentage of particular types of paper, a breakdown by year, an indication of the other parts of the institution they co-author the most with. It could also pull together available information such as access and full text/downloads (or identify where there are full text gaps) as well as citation data. Much of this data already exists but being able to unify it and visually display would be very useful/interesting for authors.

Contact

William Nixon (@williamjnixon)

Idea 2

In the light of the Finch Report, could a developer build a mechanism whereby a deposit into a repository triggers a workflow for submitting and paying for Gold OA. In other words, bringing the repository into the Gold OA process and adding value to this.

Contact

Chris Awre (@clawre)

Idea 3

Could a developer pick up on William’s dashboard idea, but apply this to data, such that a display presents information on what data is stored, where it is stored (local, off-site, cloud, etc.) and relevant tasks/workflow steps required to guide ongoing management.

Contact

Chris Awre (@clawre)

Idea 4

Could a developer produce a widget to give users the code to more easily embed an object (image, pdf, audio or video — would have to be a recognized file format or mime type) in their own web page? Give the user options for including limited metadata in that embedded view?

Contact

Linda Newman

Idea 5

What might be possible to support a ‘drag and drop’ interface from a researcher’s desktop to our repositories? (This idea may not be completely new, but possibly worth re-visiting with current tools?)

Contact

Linda Newman

Idea 6

Can a developer come up with a way that a digital repository can easily ingest a copy of a particular version of a piece of software that is stored in a public code repository (e.g. GitHub, SourceForge), in such a way that common metadata like copyright owner, license, contributors, and dependencies are correctly recorded.

Contact

Neil Chue Hong (@npch)

Idea 7

Can a developer come up with a way for a digital repository that has ingested a copy of a piece of software to run provided tests to assess the point when the software becomes obsolescent.