Science IT is launching a new tool called inseri core that aims to allow researchers to create and publish interactive and executable online content without requiring web development skills. inseri core is a WordPress plugin under active development that introduces scientific and interactive components to facilitate open science. 

• Do you want to allow other researchers or the general public to explore your research via a web interface?
• Do you want such a web interface to contain interactive and executable web content (with no JavaScript required)?
• Do you want to reuse and remix open access data in your web content?
• Do you want to build modern web pages for your research project without knowing how to code with HTML/CSS/JavaScript and without setting up or operating your own web server?

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, please read on. Science IT, via the inseri.swiss project financed by the swissuniversities – Open Science Program 2021-2024, is working on a tool called inseri core for WordPress
(https://wordpress.org/plugins/inseri-core/) to help researchers with these goals.

The goal of inseri is to enable scholars to design web pages without any prior web programming knowledge. inseri connects open data providers, interactive online components, web APIs, and local data so that a user can combine them in a variety of ways. Its principal purpose is to serve as a base for an online collaborative and publishing platform that allows the researchers to publish open, FAIR, citable, interactive, and executable web content with ease for effortless re-use by any researcher or the general public.

WordPress is a free and open-source software that supports the publishing of web content (e.g., websites and blogs). It is the most popular content management system, and around 43% of websites from the relevant web are built with WordPress (see the statistics and the methodology here). In 2018 WordPress introduced the block editor, which is a new publishing experience that is part of the Gutenberg project and that aims to revolutionize editing, customization, collaboration, and multilingual support (see the roadmap here). The new block editor provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that allows page editors to create flexible layouts without having to write HTML/CSS code.

inseri core is a WordPress plugin that introduces scientific and interactive blocks to facilitate open science. The inseri core blocks are not isolated elements but instead they can receive input from and give output to other inseri core blocks, which enables interactivity. For example, a block can take some text as input (text that the page visitors can enter) and another block can contain a Python script that counts the number of characters previously entered, which can then be dynamically displayed.

Currently, the following blocks are provided:

• Download Block: It gives guests the possibility to download data from another block.
• Dropdown Block: It provides guests customizable options that can be used to affect other blocks.
• HTML Code Block: It renders HTML code using the other block’s data.
• Image Box Block: It displays an image utilizing the data of another block.
• Local File Import Block: It allows guests to provide their own data for blocks.
• Media Collection Block: A collection of media files is made available as data for other blocks.
• Plotly Chart Block: It visualizes the data of another block using Plotly.
• Python Code Block: Guests can run Python code with data from other blocks with the use of Pyodide and the result of the execution is made available to other blocks.
• Text Editor Block: It allows the sharing of text content like JSON or XML with other blocks.
• Text Viewer Block: It displays text content like JSON or XML from other block.
• Web API Block: It enables access to web API’s and subsequent sharing of the data with other blocks.
• Zenodo Repository Block: Using a DOI, a dataset can be loaded from https://zenodo.org/ and shared with other blocks.

New blocks (e.g., IIIF Viewer, Table Viewer) are on our roadmap, and more information about the project can be found at https://inseri.swiss.

Detailed documentation is available at https://docs.inseri.swiss.

• Do you want to be an early adopter?
• Do you plan to use inseri for your research project?
• Are you interested in a future collaboration in the context of open science?

Don’t hesitate to contact us at inseri-contact@s3it.lists.uzh.ch .

Do you want to get regular updates about our project? Please subscribe to the inseri.swiss community mailing list: https://s3it.lists.uzh.ch/sympa/subscribe/inseri-community . 

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash