Roadmap Overview

DocMaps is a framework for representing the editorial processes used to create journal articles, preprints, peer reviews, and other documents in a machine-readable, extensible, interoperable format. This roadmap is intended to be a general overview of DocMaps’ project goals. It will provide a high-level list of social/technical projects regarding what we're thinking about, what we've prioritized, what we're currently working on, and what we've done.

We use GitHub to track sprints of work and document up-to-date lists of features. If you have a specific bug to report or a feature request, you can add a new issue to a repository in the DocMaps project.

Last updated: 4 July 2023

DONE

Pilot with eLife, EMBO, and CSHL

The initial pilot of DocMaps sent information about community preprint evaluations from eLife’s Sciety and EMBO’s Early Evidence Base to CSHL Press’s biorxiv and medrxiv. This pilot created 5,000+ DocMaps for preprints related to biology research. In addition to giving various presentations during the pilot process, we wrote retrospective documentation about DocMaps implementation between Sciety, Early Evidence Base, and bioRxiv. 

Improve Process and Documentation

Project Homepage • Technical Documentation

With the pilot completed, we revised docmaps.knowledgefutures.org to increase transparency regarding the efforts of DocMaps. We also launched our technical documentation page at docmaps-project.github.io/docmaps for the packages and tools maintained by the Docmaps Project core maintainers.

Software Development Kit

Code Repository • Documentation

Based on conversations with the DocMaps Technical Committee and Pilot Working Group, as well as various community groups, preprint server and review infrastructure developers, and aggregators, we have developed a software development kit (SDK) for producing and consuming DocMaps. The SDK is designed to help facilitate DocMaps implementation for developers interested in integrating this framework. 

Platform Community Assessment

In our interest to expand DocMaps to previously identified aggregators and preprint servers, we have held conversations with potential collaborators in the preprint publishing ecosystem to identify integration needs, complexities and challenges, as well as what KF can support in these collaborations. As a result of these conversations, we are currently working on implementation agreements for integrating DocMaps into other platforms. 

Preprint Review Groups User Research 

Working with the DocMaps Implementation Group and key advisors, we coordinated a series of user interviews with review groups. These conversations helped the DocMaps team to better understand review processes, priorities, needed tools, outputs which are reflect on this roadmap.

IN PROGRESS

Expanding DocMaps Implementation Group

Piloting DocMaps with new collaborators, we will work to expand our implementation group to engage DocMaps producers and consumers in conversation In particular, we hope this expansion helps all stakeholders understand new challenges and opportunities in the creation/consumption of DocMaps and the display of peer review status on preprint pages. We plan to build DocMaps integrations with/for preprint review platforms, aggregators, or preprint servers with open-source codebases or accessible APIs.

DocMaps Governance

As DocMaps implementation develops across platforms, we want to convene developers and other stakeholders. The DocMaps Stakeholders Forum will be an ongoing series of calls for developers/organizations interested in/working with DocMaps. These calls will be entirely driven by the user community. The goal is to create a space for discussion that will enable practitioners to connect with one another and identify common denominators, issues, and roadblocks that affect users across different organizations.

Interoperability Protocol

Request for Comments Repository • Initial RFC

At this stage in the development of the Docmaps ecosystem, there is significant demand for Docmaps data for preprints but relatively little adoption by preprint repositories. Already, various preprint repositories are implementing their own mechanisms for serving docmaps, which is encouraged. However, there is risk of divergent standards emerging that place significant burden on consumers to handle multiple API contracts. There is additional engineering overhead involved in building several different client and server libraries in parallel. With a majority of use cases covered by a single protocol, we can implement the protocol once per language and share the code; and clients written in various languages will naturally be interoperable.

ON DECK 

DocMaps Widget

Our initial community assessment and user interviews have revealed a widespread need for a streamlined mechanism for retrieving and visualizing DocMaps on sites run by groups that do not have extensive technical resources. Working with these groups and implementation group partners, and building on our interoperability protocol work, we will develop a widget that will allow groups to display DocMaps data on their sites by adding a small bit of code, similar to common academic metrics widgets.

Endorsements & Integration with Community Standards

In order to support efforts from a wider range of publishers, we are working to secure endorsements and mapping with other community standards. We will work with community standards groups to facilitate the creation of DocMaps integrations with emerging standards like JATS4R, PrEF, NISO Peer Review Terminology, Project Notify, etc. This is a key step in sustainability within the publishing ecosystem and in conversation with existing community data standards. 

FUTURE

Onboarding Services and Support

Our pilot has increased the number and kinds of evaluations displayed alongside preprints, providing greater visibility and credibility. Interest in preprint evaluation among authors and reviewers has risen as a consequence, demonstrated by the growth of both the number of curators on Sciety and EEB and the number of preprint reviews. As the DocMaps Implementation Group continues to grow, we plan to create adoption guides, best practices, and other sources of documentation to sustain DocMaps within the publishing ecosystem. We will work with partners to coordinate the building, testing, and launch of Docmaps integrations.