Open Science Network: Distributed social infrastructure for open scientific discussion

Scientific conversations that once took place on Twitter have scattered to other platforms, such as LinkedIn and Bluesky. Like Twitter, these services operate as walled gardens, limiting access for unregistered users. Furthermore, identity verification and public recognition have become paid services that lack reliability and oversight.

Thanks to a W3C-standardized protocol called ActivityPub, the same one behind Mastodon, open and distributed social feeds, where users from different servers can read and interact, are already available. Using open protocols is the best way to enable scientific communication that both peers and the general public can trust.

The Open Science Network (https://openscience.network/) is designing and deploying a software for federated scientific communication. The app uses Bonfire's open-source framework and the ActivityPub protocol as a backbone. The goal is to create federated digital spaces in which researchers and institutions have complete control over their data, including their conversations and networks. Universities can host their own instances while being interconnected with a global network of scientific communities. Discussions can become citable, FAIR objects with DOIs. Publications are enriched with metadata and collaborative tools.

The Open Science Network is co-designed with researchers, scientific communities, and open science advocates who understand that scientific communication tools shape science itself. Platforms that prioritize engagement over accuracy cannot facilitate reliable scientific communication. The software provides ORCID authentication and Zenodo repository archiving for social posts. Planned features include custom peer review, multiple trust signal workflows, semantic data linking, a framework for experimenting with new forms of scientific communication, proper and verified attribution, federated groups, knowledge management and curation tools, long-term preservation, and space for inventing features not included in this list.