GenR Guide Sprint Method

Context: About GenR ‘Guides Needed’ programme

The GenR open science community platform has spent over three years supporting and blogging about open science communities. From this experience the decision was made to focus on guides as being the best instrument for condensing tacit knowledge and scaling open science values. Dec ‘21

The Guides Needed programme is to support open science communities with ‘editorial and publishing know-how’ to produce their own, volunteer run, guides for good open science practice. The programme is closely aligned with the Open Science Lab’s (TIB) NextGen Book service — which is sharing its know-how and technology with the GenR community.

Have a question you can join the discussion on GitHub or get hold of Genr on Element / Matrix Chat https://matrix.to/#/#genr:matrix.org or email [email protected]

Blogpost: https://genr.eu/wp/guide-needed/

Discussion: https://github.com/Gen-R/guide-needed/discussions

Method objectives

The method is designed to help speedily produce different types of guides: step-by-step guides, cheat sheets, comprehensive guide books, reformat and improve existing guides, remix guides, to software manuals.

The method is designed support researchers with editorial and publishing know-how to enable them to share their working practice knowledge.

The method is a work in progress and open to review, please drop into our discussion area.

Publishing tools

GenR has a publishing tool chain the ADA Publishing Pipeline from the Open Science Lab (TIB) that can automate a lot of the time-consuming multi-format publishing steps. See: https://write.handbuch.io and accompanying repo https://github.com/TIBHannover/ADA. The tool chain is extensible.

Here you can see an example multi-format output using ADA from the LIBER Citizen Science Working Group: Citizen Science Skilling for Library Staff, Researchers, and the Public https://cs4rl.github.io/guide/#/

Additionally, GitHub and GitLab are used for coordination.

Support is also available from collaboration partners COPIM, https://copim.ac.uk/

Process and workflow

The process is supported with know-how from GenR in the areas of: technical, publishing, production, editorial, and design. But productions need to be staffed by the volunteers as GenR does not have such resources available.

Workload: Participants told in advance the expected time allocation they will need to contribute – so they know what they are committing too, these are indicative labor time allocation.

• An author / editor would need to spend about 12 hours minimum on guide

• Publishing participants an extra 8 hours

• Reviewers 4 hours

Review: Participants get the title of author and editors, etc., and we issue DOIs. Publications should have an editorial board (4+), two designated reviewers, and be put out in public for open peer review.

Open Science Publishing, and train-the-trainer: Participants can take part in the publishing technicals, editorial, design, and communications if they like. These parts will have document tasks, with step-by-step guides. Tasks are things like adding to DataCite DOIs, Thoth, WikiData, Wiki Commons, LOD, writing book sheets, Amazon and Ingram content distribution, book trade metadata, GitHub / Lab use, etc.

Then rinse repeat the following as guides grow, change, and evolve.

1. Announce: Make an announcement and call for contribution for a guide in our ‘request a guide / offer a guide’ section: https://github.com/Gen-R/guide-needed/discussions/categories/request-a-guide-offer-a-guide

2. Recruit participants: Depending on the scope of the guide a volunteers project needs enough contributors, editors, reviewers, designers, technologists, and other specialists are needed to complete a publication.

3. Outline meeting – Make the Table of Contents: Convene a meeting to scope the question as a round table meeting and make a draft ‘Table of Contents’ and list out questions that need addressing. 1.5 hours

4. Writing Sprint!: Meet a week later for a half day sprint and write the guide – tightly templated publications work the best – like so, a quick reference guide: https://www.techsmith.com/blog/quick-reference-guide/. It makes it much easier, it's just like filling in boxes – we also borrow from Diataxis method: https://diataxis.fr/

5. Review: Circulate draft for public review and carry out open peer review.

6. Translation built in: Guides are designed to be usable in ML/AI, human translation workflows.

7. Publish as multi-format: We publish as multi-format using ADA, see the example – #CS4RL https://cs4rl.github.io/guide/#. Publications are OA, with print-on-demand too – with global purchasing pricing parity (PPP) (meaning priced at regional market cost), and local printing and shipping. PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity.