JROST is now a community initiative of Invest in Open Infrastructure. Learn more about our 14–16 December 2020 event.

What

We propose an effort to develop a “Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools”. This will be delivered by an informal group of like-minded organizations coming together around a common purpose.

Our objectives will be to deliver:

• A vision for the toolchain or dashboard of the researcher of the future
• A mission for what we hope to achieve and how we can work together
• A set of user stories that together describe the problems we want to solve
• A preliminary roadmap for how the known existing projects can come together
• Next steps

Why

There is a growing category of open science technologies and services stewarded by non-profit organizations that are targeting the key needs and requirements of scholarly production, publishing, dissemination and collaboration. However, to date, the major projects in this category have not made a unified effort to come together, compare notes, and identify areas of cooperation and integration. As leaders of these projects ourselves, we are aware there are obvious synergies that are not being pursued, and likely many others still waiting to be discovered. Moreover, there is no holistic vision or overall game plan about what the researcher experience of the future should or could be that these projects can support.

How

Through workshops and other coordinated activities we will bring together the key technology organizations and researchers who are actively involved in the design and production of open scholarly infrastructure. Our objective will be to explore shared goals and outcomes, develop cross-platform user stories, and identify obvious areas of mutual collaboration. What are our future roadmaps and how are they compatible or divergent? What integrations should we consider? What actions or paradigms should they all support? How do we design our tools so they improve researcher effectiveness, enhance publication and discovery, and together create a whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Who

We are focusing on open tools and services delivered by non-profit organizations because we know from our own experience that there is a shared sense of mission and a willingness to collaborate openly between these teams that are often lacking in their for-profit counterparts. These groups are actively building and delivering solutions, and thus have product roadmaps that they can speak authoritatively to. It is also critical that researchers participate because their needs and perspective drives the demand for what we’re doing, and thus our goals.

When

Collaboration started during April, 2018.