OiPub is an easy-to-use platform for discovering and sharing the latest scientific research with colleagues and peers.

Keeping a research community updated with all relevant research publications and information is a never-ending task. With over 4 million articles published in 2021, growing rapidly at over 5% per year[1], it’s hard for anyone to keep up with a given topic.

Other academic social and networking platforms attempt to solve the problem of providing online information hubs and targeted research communities by allowing users to add papers and share them with individual groups. This creates a large burden on users for keeping information relevant to their group active and updated. This requires considerable work, which most researchers have no time for. Typically resulting in messy low-quality data uploaded, with grey literature of unknown origin, or poor metadata and errors, mixed in with recognised peer-reviewed research.

The result is that online research communities are currently much more limited in scope than they could be and often not good information sources, limiting online collaboration and making finding and following research areas much harder than necessary.

On OiPub, staying up to date is as simple as pressing “Follow” on your Topics of choice. OiPub automatically imports research data, publication metadata and metrics from all recognised respected sources available to us (including OpenAire [Publications & Metrics], Scholexplorer [Datasets], ORCID [Authors]) and uses our Natural Language Processing to extract Topic information. Each Topic acts as an information hub for all information related to that subject.

Topics can also be combined by users to create custom Communities following specific interests, that are automatically kept up to date with feeds of all the latest research data relevant to them. Each feed includes filtering and sorting tools, allowing users to easily find the exact information they need, making academic information much more Findable and Accessible.

Additionally, with OiPub, users can discuss in their own private team community, or broadcast discussions by Topic, to reach all public communities interested in those subjects. This facilitates collaboration and discussion for both focused private teams as well as public, international and interdisciplinary research.

Omni Iota Science Limited has received support through the EOSC Digital Innovation Hub (https://eosc-dih.eu/oipub/) and its service partners EGI-ACE and OpenAire Nexus through the EOSC Future project, and funding grants through the Malta Council for Science and Technology (ongoing) and the Malta Information Technology Agency for the development of its platform OiPub.

You can find an early concept demo video in the link below - design subject to change:

https://youtu.be/_rPJ11ZBvIk

OiPub is scheduled for release of its open beta in July 2023.

Our system makes it easier to Find and Access research information, key components of the FAIR principles, bringing together information from multiple open science initiatives into one simple platform.