Can This Open Access Publishing Platform Attract Researchers’ Attention?

Octopus, which was launched in 2022, is an open access research dissemination platform that allows researchers across disciplines to produce multiple “micro-publications” for a given research project, offering readers a realistic, detailed portrayal of the research process. Conceived as a way of toppling roadblocks in scientific publishing while maintaining a high degree of verifiable quality, Octopus reduces the time and administrative hurdles required for researchers to publish their work while enabling in-depth reproducibility and highlighting results that are not necessarily headline-grabbing or positive.

The platform is a project of the UK agency Jisc. A not-for-profit entity dedicated to technological enhancements to education and research, Jisc is funded by UK education bodies and membership subscriptions; neither Octopus nor Jisc profits from the platform.

In a time of the centralization and siloing of research by publishing conglomerates, Octopus, with its emphasis on the free flow of knowledge and community benefit, presents a strong ethical alternative for researchers.

Product Overview/Description

Octopus jettisons several features of traditional academic publishing that slow down the process or obscure the full dimensions of a work. Its most distinctive element is its method of organization. Octopus breaks down the work traditionally encompassed by a single journal article into eight publication types that correspond to the phases of the research process as it is generally understood in scientific disciplines, namely:

• Research Problem
• Rationale/Hypothesis
• Method
• Results
• Analysis (generally understood as finding statistical or thematic patterns in the results)
• Interpretation (a discussion of the result patterns)
• Real World Application
• Peer Review

Publications are linked sequentially in a chain corresponding to the sequential nature of the research process. Researchers can also link to works outside of Octopus, e.g., to Google Drive folders or external websites. Octopus does not monitor the persistence or accuracy of external links itself; rather, it relies on the community to report any issues through its peer review and red flag system. The red flag system allows readers to note potential issues with a publication by selecting from a menu of concerns with space to provide brief feedback.

The sequence of the research cycle and related publications is represented graphically by a set of columns, as seen in Figure 1.

This method of organization emphasizes the fact that Octopus’s primary audience comprises researchers in the sciences, although researchers from any discipline, including in the humanities and the social sciences, can use the platform. Crucially, Octopus doesn’t accept or reject material; rather, it relies on a community system of assessment and comment to determine the veracity and worth of published work. The platform makes peer review visible by giving it its own category of publication. Octopus also has versioning capability, with each version of a given work provisioned its own DOI. Community assessment information, including fields for peer reviews and red flags, is clearly displayed.

All material deposited in Octopus is assigned a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0 is set as default, although the author can contact Octopus to request a different Creative Commons option).

The geographic locus of the company is the United Kingdom. It is managed by Jisc in partnership with the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN), a consortium that promotes the country’s centrality in research. Octopus also receives support from Research England. That said, according to Octopus, only about 30 percent of its current users are in the United Kingdom, a data point that speaks to its already considerable international reach.

Authors don’t need to install anything to use the platform. Octopus is integrated with ORCiD (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), an industry-standard platform to uniquely identify researchers and their outputs. Anyone can sign up for Octopus by visiting the site and logging into or creating an ORCiD profile.

User Experience

Octopus has a simple, streamlined interface through which researchers can find materials and submit their work.

In a format that will be familiar to users of many academic institutional repositories, a “Quick Search” box appears across the middle of the layout, alongside a drop-down menu to specify what category to search (Publications, Authors, Topics, Organisations). A sidebar provides facets for publication type, author type, and date (Figure 2). Search results appear as a list under the search bar (Figure 3).

Downloads are available in PDF and JSON formats; from a publication’s page, users can easily jump to sections such as main text, linked topics, funders, and conflicts of interest.

The author interface is similarly straightforward. Clicking on “Publish” in the top right-hand corner leads the user to an ORCid sign in. Once authenticated, the user is prompted to choose the publication type and to enter the title, both of which are required to create a new item, as are fields for affiliations, linked items, the main text (which can be imported from MS Word), and a conflict-of-interest statement (Figure 4). There are also optional fields for funding and co-authors.

The platform’s Author Guide provides extensive instructions on metadata creation. Notable in the process is a place to add links to the publication from other items in Octopus—existing publications or research topics—to form “research chains” (Figure 5).

An application programming interface (API) documentation page lists the commands required to complete various operations using APIs, including harvesting author affiliations from ORCiD, managing bookmarks, adding co-authors and other metadata, and managing publication information. It also describes how to request an API key. In the longer term, Octopus aims to make APIs an easy and useful tool for bibliographic data harvesting within institutional and individual publishing workflows.

Octopus describes itself as partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. A full list of noncompliant elements, which Octopus is working to resolve by mid-2025, appears on the website. Accessibility features include the ability to change colors, contrast, and fonts, zoom in, and use keyboard navigation or speech-recognition software, and Octopus provides contact information for those who need assistance. At this point, however, the keyboard navigation does not distinguish between the different publication types, links do not have informational text, and skip links are generally not available.

I checked the Octopus website’s accessibility at accessibilitychecker.org, which gave it a score of 89 out of 100 for compliance with relevant European and North American laws (ADA and Section 508 for the US, and EN 301 549 for Europe). The nonconformities were missing milestone elements for screen readers.

Contracting and Pricing Provisions

Octopus is free to use, whether for researchers looking for information or for authors wanting to publish. Researchers do not receive compensation for participating in Octopus’s open peer-review system.

Authentication Models

As noted above, authentication to publish on Octopus happens via an integration with ORCiD. As the material on Octopus is all open access, there is no authentication required for readers.

Competitive or Related Products

Octopus describes itself as like a “patent office” for researchers, where they can establish authorship for smaller, discrete bits of their work without the need to go through the traditional publishing process. In this way it is similar to institutional or consortial repositories, especially those from research institutions with robust infrastructure, which readers may be familiar with in an academic or intergovernmental context. These entities champion open access and often don’t require a finished published article for publication. But they should be considered complements to Octopus rather than competitors, as Octopus has a broader reach than any single institution or even most consortia.

Zenodo is an open access platform centered in the European Union that emphasizes open access discoverability. Like Octopus, Zenodo positions itself as a place for researchers to deposit their material ahead of its official appearance of the work in scholarly journals, etc. Currently, Zenodo is the larger platform, with roughly 130,000 records published at the time of writing.

Other open repositories such as Figshare (with its emphasis on data) and OSF (Open Science Framework) which, as the name implies, is weighted towards STEM topics, may also be considered competitors.

Octopus is distinguished by its eight publication types, which, aligned as they are to the traditional scientific research cycle, help it satisfy funder requirements. For example, Octopus is compliant with a framework to assess the quality of research in the UK called Research Excellence Framework (REF) and seeks to be compatible with other similar standards.

Critical Evaluation

Octopus does the research community a service by articulating the different work products associated with the research process. The patent office metaphor is likely to appeal to researchers who want to publish work products from the entire research lifecycle prior to traditional publication. The integration with ORCiD is also a strength, adding credence to Octopus’s claim that it supports broad discoverability.

Apart from the accessibility issues mentioned above, the user interface offers a simple, easily comprehensible visual presentation that provides users ready access to information of interest. The search function works well, bringing up relevant results for a variety of basic keywords. It will be interesting to monitor how search evolves as the amount of material in the platform—currently modest—grows.

The principal weakness, one not inherent to the resource itself, is that in a fragmented landscape, it is one more place seeking the trust and time of researchers to deposit their materials. The platform’s alignment with the scientific research process helps build a persuasive case for its broad adoption. Naturally, its success towards that goal is an open question. Greater user engagement would enhance the quality of the platform’s peer review and interactive elements. For example, at the time of writing, there are only four peer reviews of publications on the site, and there is no way to filter for items marked with a “red flag” other than through an API. But the site is still new. Greater engagement can certainly be expected over time, and Octopus appears well-positioned to gain additional users.

Another consideration is that the platform originated from and currently features much work from the United Kingdom. While that fact makes it a natural choice for UK researchers, it may not be one for those who are geographically or culturally distant. Octopus is integrated with Jisc’s Publications Router, an alerting service that transmits information from publishers and other providers to repositories and institutions; additional integrations would help broaden its reach.

Recommendation

Octopus is a thoughtfully designed, ethical, and transparent platform for researchers who wish to share their materials, as well as a good place for community to grow around the practice of open peer review. Despite some relatively minor accessibility hurdles, Octopus appears well-equipped to assume a growing role in the crowded field of publishing platforms and provide an alternative to the traditional path to publication. The challenge for the platform will be to further establish itself among researchers as a desirable option. Octopus’s uncomplicated interface, intuitive publishing process, and mapping to the scientific research process, along with its commitment to open access and transparent peer review, offer a compelling argument for its widespread adoption in the advancement of open research.