1. Scratchpads
Past, present & future
Ed Baker
Natural History Museum, London
edwab@nhm.ac.uk

2. Scratchpads: the concept
1 2 3
Your data Uploaded & “Published” & reviewed
tagged on your site
Fast Intuitive Fit for use
http://scratchpads.eu

3. Scratchpads: 2007-2011
http://scratchpads.eu/siteslist

4. Scratchpad usecases
http://scratchpads.eu/siteslist

5. Scratchpad usecases
http://scratchpads.eu/siteslist

6. Scratchpad usage
Mar. 2007 - Dec. 2010
25 May, 2011
239 sites
3212 users
371,947 nodes

7. Scratchpads: the present
Financial support until Dec. 2013
ViBRANT
Virtual Biodiversity

8. Scratchpads 2
• Scheduled for January 2012 (5 years after Scratchpad 1)
• Move from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 (4 year upgrade cycle, UI + entities)
• 67 Contributed modules (31 done, 14 untested, 22 to do)
• 52 Scratchpad modules (28 done, 14 untested, 10 to do)
• Migrate current Scratchpads
• New technical enhancements (hosting env., git, services, registry…)
- supporting sustainability
• New user features (theme, workflow, spp. pages, mapping, services)
- supporting “publication”
http://wiki.scratchpads.eu/w/Wp2

9. Scratchpads 2: user enhancements
Consistent Scratchpad theme
• Most sites use Garland (improves site looks)
• Idiosyncratic (colours & layouts)
• Sp2 more professional & scholarly
• Some flexibility (site profiles)

10. Scratchpads 2: user enhancements
Improved administrative interface & workflows
• Basic vs. advanced admin
• Poor findability, hard to use
• Hide unnecessary items
• Workflow complex functions 2
1
- Integrate complex actions
- Guide the user through each step 3
o Adding users
o Site setup functions
o Groups & permissions
o Edit / add content types
4
o Importing content & taxonomy
o Creating services 5
o Creating views
o “Pages” menu concept

11. Scratchpads 2: user enhancements
Project themed scratchpads
• New site management system (Aegir)
• Support project specific profiles
• themes, modules & wokflows
• Example themes include
• eMonocot sites
• GBIF Nodes Portal Toolkit
• EOL LifeDesks?

12. Scratchpads 2: user enhancements
New species pages
• Directly edit the page
• Better presentation
• Tabs (myspecies / ispecies)
• Data inheritance (parent-child)
• Better content controls
• More intelligent ispecies filters

13. Scratchpads 2: user enhancements
Integrated mapping
• 3 current map types
GBIF occurrence records
Areas (TDWG level 4)
Specimen point localities

14. Scratchpads 2: user enhancements
Integrated mapping
• 3 current map types Edit point
metadata on map
• All integrated & editable in Scratchpads 2
TDWG area data
(from Scratchpads)
Point localities
(from Scratchpads)
Point localities
(from GBIF)
Point localities
(from flickr)
Areas (TDWG level 4)

15. Scratchpads: the future
A natively digital scholarly communication system
• The article was (is) the unit of scholarly comm. (350yrs)
• Research practices have moved on
o Highly collaborative, data intensive & networked
• Scholarly communication has not adapted (e.g. the PDF)
• Published “knowledge” hides “dark data”
• Need a natively digital scholarly communication system
o Must support end-to-end the lifecycle of data, information & knowledge
“the future scholarly communication system should
closely resemble—and be intertwined with—the
scholarly endeavor itself, rather than being
its after-thought or annex” Sompel et al 2004. http://bit.ly/
Van de
a3o9UX

16. Current publishing efforts on Scratchpads
1. Low cost journal infrastructure
• Scratchpads used to publish PDFs (1,000’s)
• Independent editorial control & peer review
• Free to publish, open access, no page limits
• ISBN’s, but no doi’s, PubMed or ISI impact
• No online submission, just static PDFs

17. Current publishing efforts on Scratchpads
2. Simple data publishing > GBIF
Specimen records Pushed to 3rd party specialist
on Scratchpads data publishers
>18K specimen records >276M specimen records
(local small scale coverage) (worldwide coverage)

18. Next generation article publishing
3. From prototype to operation
Paper assembled from XML submission, peer review &
Scratchpad database marked-up publication by Pensoft
doi:10.3897/zookeys.50.539
5-step workflow for selecting data, XML
HTML
PDF
Published in Zookeys & Phytokeys
adding metadata & previewing (worldwide coverage)

19. Next generation data publishing
4. Formally publishing metadata descriptions of datasets
Dataset & metadata description Dataset description reviewed,
assembled in Scratchpad published & citable from new journal
Dataset
doi:xxxx.50.539 doi:10.3897/biodat.50.539
Datasets built & described via a Dataset description published in
Scratchpad & dataset deposited in new data publication journal
permanent repository