The latest platform news from sciety.org, the home of community preprint evaluation.
š What's new?
We're excited to share progress on our NLnet-funded project "An OpenScience flavour of Bonfire on NixOS for preprints" - work that's bringing us closer to enabling federated discussion spaces for preprint communities. Our current initiative focuses on building replicable deployments of Bonfire that can integrate with Sciety, making it easier for preprint authors, reviewers and advocates to engage in meaningful scholarly discourse.
Reproducible deployment of a preprint discussion space
We've recently completed our initial research on deployment options and conducted experiments with various NixOS deployments for Bonfire. Key to our approach is prioritising ease of use and reproducibility for our target audiences: researchers actively reading preprints, university/institutional IT teams, and grassroots collectives operating with limited technical resources.
We tested both manual ISO installation and automated deployment approaches, and documented the complete learning journey.
You can explore this in detail at:
tl;dr - We've successfully implemented automated deployment using nixos-anywhere, transforming a manual installation processes into a single-command deployment and we're continuing to evolve this to meet the needs of research communities.
What this means for the community:
- Simplified deployment: Research groups will be able to deploy Bonfire instances without deep systems administration expertise
- Reproducible environments: All configuration is version-controlled and declaratively managed, enabling better community support
Our working deployment can be found at: https://github.com/sciety/sciety-bonfire-nix
Through this work, we've demonstrated that it's possible to deploy NixOS and Bonfire on cloud infrastructure with minimal manual intervention and create reproducible configurations that would be suitable for research communities.
ORCID integration
We have also now connected up ORCID at discussions.sciety.org, readying it for testing. What this means is that:
- you can sign up with your existing ORCID login, or associate your ORCID account with your existing Sciety Discussions account.
- When a new work is associated with your ORCID, it will be posted to the Fediverse. A useful feature for those that are involved in authoring papers and in peer review of preprints. For example, if you publicly associate your reviews with your ORCID profile through PREreview these could then be posted on Sciety Discussions and be added as part of the history of the preprint activity.
š What's next?
Join in our testing
We'll soon be running feedback sessions on dicussions.sciety.org, so look out for invites. In the meantime, we're building this infrastructure to serve the preprint community's needs for open, decentralised discussion spaces. If you're interested in federated preprint discussion, deploying Bonfire for your community, or contributing to this work, we'd love to hear from you.
Book a 1:1 call to learn more about our progress and help shape the future of federated scholarly communication.
Custom Bonfire NixOS module development
We are now looking to capitalise on our initial work, creating a comprehensive NixOS module that will make Bonfire deployment as simple as possible.We'll be implementing secrets handling, to manage secrets declaratively, and rather than packaging Bonfire's entire dependency graph natively in Nix (which would be unsustainable for a small team), we're leveraging OCI containers published by the core Bonfire team.
If all this sounds very technical, We'll be creating accessible documentation that bridges the gap between Nix's technical complexity and the needs of research communities. This includes step-by-step guides and troubleshooting resources.
Bonfire extension for sharing preprint reviews
We are aiming to start work soon on the Sciety extension for Bonfire which will share evaluated preprints as research objects in Bonfire and allow people to comment on any aspect of the preprint or review.
š Stay connected
This work represents an important step toward more open, community-controlled scholarly infrastructure.
You can follow our technical progress via documentation on Sciety's github repostitory and continue to connect with us on Mastodon and LinkedIn.
This work is made possible through funding from NLnet, supporting our mission to create more open and accessible scholarly communication infrastructure.