Research Collaboration Software

Question

[Jack Pincus]

Research collaborations sometimes span multiple sites. Open source and proprietary collaboration software has been developed to facilitiate dispersed collaborations but most are document or conent management centric. Spome claim project managment capabilites but are these are mostly disgiend for business collaboratons and are not extensible. Has anyone thought of developing an extensible data centric collaboration system? Some functionalities might inlcude support multiple file types (e.g., spreadsheets, graphs, charts, images, scientific metadata schema and annotations, and provide tools for shared data analysis.

[Michael]

Hi Jack! ("Jack has over thirty four years of technology commercialization, business development, and licensing experience. He has held senior research, business development, and marketing positions in start up and established companies.") Obviously your company does develop such a product, but if you are the real Jack Pincus, and not just a Troll, you should know better than trying to abuse this forum for raising attention to your product. If you have a different agent, then please say so directly. I will close this question for not being a real question, if you don't contribute.

[Jack Pincus]

I just saw your post and now know why my question disappeared. For the record, I was not pushing my company's product under development or any other product. (In fact, we are currently in development and not selling any products.) Rather, I was seeking information on what tools, if any, researchers are using for collaboration and whether anyone is aware of a product under development. We do not use forums for promoting our product or take any other blatant actions that are contrary to the policies of internet communities.

Answer 1

[Niallhaslam]

Quite a few people seem to be advocating OpenAtrium. Its an addon to Drupal - a well established Content Management System. A lot of what you are described seems to overlap with the idea of an open or electronic notebook. I've tried to play around with a few of them e.g. LabTrove - but never really had much joy rolling it out as a platform for a large group.

From my reading openatrium seems to be the closest to what you are looking for and I'm sure others will chime in with their experiences of it and other software. The big advantage of it is that it is extensible so if it doesn't do exactly what you want you are free to create add-ons.

Can you elaborate a bit on your requirements? Is it (for example) for lab data or analysis data or documents?