Hosting parts of a publication elsewhere

The types of publication available on Octopus are designed to provide a means of writing up a research project in full, but there are plenty of other platforms out there that are designed to cover a specific aspect of a project in much more detail. This can come in many forms, from platforms focused on storing code such as GitHub, to those focused on certain stages of a research project such as protocols.io. These platforms are often useful for a specific aspect or stage of a research project, whilst Octopus provides the space to record details of an entire project.

On Octopus, researchers can detail the full breadth of a research project, collating the outputs they have stored elsewhere and presenting them comprehensively. To make it easier to do this, we've added a new feature that allows authors to enter a link to parts of their work hosted elsewhere, along with a brief description. This information is presented in a way that allows readers to quickly navigate to other platforms and browse these outputs in more detail. During the publishing process, keep an eye out for the "Link to part of this work hosted elsewhere" section under the "Main Text" tab.

In future, we will be expanding upon this feature to allow researchers to automatically collect data from other platforms that they have linked to, and include it in their Octopus publications. This will provide a more complete summary of all components of a project regardless of where they are hosted. Collating this metadata about a research project in one place will also ensure that a thorough record can be carried over to other systems such as institutional repositories.