How You Can Contribute to SciRate

Posted on October 6, 2018 by Noon van der Silk

Since 2017, I’ve been managing and funding SciRate on my own. But SciRate hasn’t survived, since it’s inception 2007, through entirely the time and money of one person. Any community needs involvement from community members to thrive. It’s actually quite a great example of an open-source projcet that has changed hands several times over the years.

I’d now like to invite participation from you, the community, and outline a few ways in which you can become involved.

1. Milestone Feature Development

The biggest feature on the roadmap is: integrating other services.

Here is my order of preference:

Presently, SciRate acts only as a front for the arXiv; but the dream was always to add more back-end services. The more such services that are added, the more useful SciRate will be as a service for paper discovery.

Luckily, the team that developed the present version of SciRate (mostly Jaiden Mispy) did an excellent job, and the database structure is essentially in place for this kind of integration to be done. The main task in any integration is working out how to bring in their paper feed into our database. The best place to look is here and here.

I’d estimate about ~2 weeks of full-time work, for someone moderately experienced with Ruby to pull this off. If you’re keen to work on this, then get in touch with me and I can help guide you through it, but putting some more details in the relevant issues.

2. Bug Fixing, Issue Reporting, Feature Requests

There’s a bunch of minor things that can be worked on by people familiar with Ruby: scirate issues on GitHub.

I’ve been very-slowly attempting to highlight the easier tasks with the “help wanted” tag on GitHub: github/scirate issues - “help wanted”.

Contributing to fixing minor bugs in SciRate is actually how I first started my involvement in the site, way back when Bill Rosgen was managing it.

We’re also very happy to receive pull requests adding new features!

3. Community Leadership

SciRate has a small group of moderators, and I’m open to more people joining. If you’re interested, get in touch via the mailing list.

I’m also open to other community engagements, such as a slack channel, for more free-flowing conversations, or guest blogs, as mentioned in the previous post. If you have an interest in any of this, then get in touch.

Please also have a careful read of the (new!) Code of Conduct.

4. Funding and Sponsorship

As I mentioned, presently SciRate is funded entirely by me, with no academic or corporate backing. If you’re an institution or organisation and you’d like to:

Then please email me; it’d be amazing to have your support!