The DocMaps Project is scaling back development and implementation work for the foreseeable future.

Reflecting on 2023

In this year of DocMaps, we developed a software development kit for producing and consuming Docmaps, reached out to preprint servers and review communities to assess integration needs, and worked on specifications for APIs and display purposes. Read more about this progress and its connections to larger themes in eve n.u.’s technical year in review.

We participated in conversations and presentations about preprint review metadata, and found the community invested in its open-source development and community governance. Following the success of the implementation group, we were able to expand the number and variety of groups with whom they interact, and learn about key needs for metadata transfer pathways among stakeholders.

Over 12,000 docmaps are created and/or consumed via platforms from five organizations (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, eLife, Europe PMC, Kotahi, and EMBO), relating to thousands of community reviews, publications, and other preprint artifacts. In addition to the technical outputs of this year, we are proud of three major achievements in preprint review:

• Increase in preprint review adoption as evidenced by preprint review groups adopting software and practices that produce ingestible DocMaps: Through existing relationships with Sciety and Early Evidence Base, docmaps are created for 14 preprint review communities, ingested by bioRxiv, medRxiv, and Europe PMC.

• Increase in preprint reviews created as a result of integrations with preprint review management tools: The integration with Kotahi (completed Q1 2023) made it easy for review communities to generate docmaps for eLife/Sciety, including Biophysics Colab and 2019 Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium (NCRC).

• Increase in preprint review visibility as a result of integration with aggregators and preprint servers: Over 9,000 preprints are labeled as “reviewed” within ePMC’s discovery portal, with links to external reviews & evaluations sourced from a variety of different community groups, peer review platforms and publishers.

Our work, combined with the other developments in the field (such as the expansion of COAR Notify and the Plan S endorsement of post-publication review models) make us confident that DocMaps has a key role to play in changing publishing landscape.

Moving Forward

This winter, the DocMaps Project full-time team will step back & our stewardship of the project will go into maintenance mode. While we are not actively developing or strategizing at this time, the Project continues to offer support for anyone interested in using DocMaps in their projects.

In practical terms:

• You can still reach out to [email protected] for requests for DocMaps support, though we can’t offer technical support at this time.

• Our open-source repositories will still be available at GitHub and NPM and accepting contributions. We actively welcome organizations invested in DocMaps to contribute and share their own issues.

Through the work of the implementation group, DocMaps will continue to increase preprint review creation, sharing, and visibility. We are aware of technical work underway to standardize the current ecosystem and implement new DocMaps tooling, as well as several platforms/communities onboarding to DocMaps in 2024. We look forward to seeing their announcements over the course of the next year! We encourage interested organizations to engage with our implementation partners about integrating with their platforms.

Thank You

We are incredibly grateful to all those who have actively participated in, contributed to, and engaged with the DocMaps Project throughout this year. Your feedback, advice, and willingness to learn together has been essential to our progress. Warmest thanks for helping this project grow.