About SHIELD and SciOp

SciOp is a software platform and an open source project created by a group of researchers, archivists, and hackers, with the goal of decentralizing the work and responsibility of preserving cultural and scientific data. Anyone can contribute storage space, bandwidth, or research. Even though it is still under active development, SciOp is currently publicly available at sciop.net. You can learn more about SciOp here in the project team’s own words.

SHIELD is a research project funded by the German Research Foundation and conducted by TIB Open Science Lab. The project’s high level goals are to support and improve the SciOp project and to deploy it as a service at TIB in order to make it available to researchers in- and outside Germany as an institutionally backed platform.

With this context in mind, the SHIELD team is working to establish the second public instance of SciOp (after sciop.net) here at TIB. Our mid-level goals are to pave paths for institutional hosting of SciOp instances, to add programmatic integrations with existing infrastructure, and to link SciOp with established academic metadata sources. We will be working as closely with the SciOp core team as we can and endeavour to upstream all of our changes to the core open source project that are in line with SciOp’s vision.