Seeking ideas for increasing software, data, and model-sharing

[Joy Ku]

The OpenSim community thrives because of the increasing contributions from many research groups around the world. We are actively seeking ideas on ways to further increase resource-sharing within the OpenSim and biomechanics communities in general and would welcome your ideas. The commentary "Perspectives on Sharing Models and Related Resources in Computational Biomechanics Research", where we highlighted current resource-sharing efforts within the OpenSim community and on-going challenges, provides some initial thoughts and we welcome your additional feedback.

Joy

[Ross Miller]

Something that's popular in open science these days is pre-print servers, e.g.

https://arxiv.org for math, physics, and related fields
https://biorxiv.org for biology
http://sportrxiv.org for sport science

Maybe SimTk.org could host a pre-print server for OpenSim papers? Or just biomechanics in general?

Ross

[Dimitar Stanev]

Hi,

It is very difficult to find open data of motion capture, emg and other related measurements that are performed by individual laboratories. It would be nice if there is an infrastructure where we can share anonymous data consistently. The process of uploading these datasets should guide the user to document, tag and describe their measurements in a standard format. The users of the platform can comment on the uploaded data. And there are of course many features that we can implement, such as inspection, cluster, classification, rewarding, rating, etc..

Regards,
Dimitris

[Ed Morra]

I thought it was ironic that the article on increasing sharing was behind an ASME paywall.

Open source models, data repositories and journal publications are a minimum requirement for sharing, all which are organizationally challenging. However, the largest challenge with sharing is that it requires shifting current funding and business models to optimize development and broad implementation for the greater good of the planet, rather than traditional business and academic fiefdoms interested in optimizing income from available financial resources. That requires a philosophical shift by program directors, many who need to see some internal gain for their external sharing before getting on board. We need to continue bringing evidence demonstrating the benefits (and risks to be fair) of open source sharing to decision makers attention, that will increase resource sharing from the top down.

- Ed -

[Joy Ku]

Thanks for the ideas. And for pointing out that the article is behind a paywall. We have gotten the publisher to make the article publicly accessible. We've started working on some of these ideas and welcome your continued input.

Joy