we do this

  • Cottage Labs commissioned to create JISC report on the advantages of APIs

      We are pleased to launch a new report on behalf of JISC that will examine the advantages of APIs in the context of the UK HE sector. This report will take in technical aspects of implementation as well as providing a perspective on the business advantages and cost implications of using APIs to share …

  • hacking the scholarly method 2: hack harder

    It’s been a couple of weeks now since dev8d and our wee chat about hacking the scholarly method. We reviewed the key aspects of scholarship (being fairly generic about it) and we considered how we might go about doing scholarship if we had all currently available technology but none of the current restrictions. So what …

  • Open? Scholarship? Science? Knowledge? Access?

    Emanuil Tolev Emanuil is a computer science student we got hooked on Open Scholarship and the HE community. He works on some of our projects in his spare time. @emanuil_tolev What is Open Scholarship? This might be immediately obvious to a member of the Higher Education software development community, or an academic of some experience. …

  • Elsevier withdraws support for the RWA

    Good news for OA today in the announcement that publishing giant Elsevier is withdrawing its support for the controversial Research Works Act in the US.  The proposed legistlation is aimed at tightening publishers control over academic content. From wikipedia: “The Research Works Act, also known as H.R. 3699, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives … on …

  • SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios

    At the start of the year Richard published a paper in D-Lib with colleagues Stuart Lewis (University of Edinburgh) and Pablo de Castro (SONEX). From the abstract: The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol was designed to facilitate the interoperable deposit of resources into systems such as repositories. The use of an interoperable standard …

  • Mapping the Higher Education Ecosystem – your feedback wanted

    Following on from some recent conversations here at cottage labs I started an attempt to map the Higher Education ecosystem. The impetus for this diagram came from discussions we have been having over the future of academic publishing, research, open access and scholarly pursuits. We wanted to get back to basics and consider themes without …

  • Hacking the scholarly method

    How about this? CI4S – Continuous integration for scholarship This week at the Dev8d conference I did a session titled “hacking the scholarly method”. Here is the blurb I put in the conference wiki: Let’s build an open scholarship toolkit. Imagine you formed a new community with none of our current political and social restrictions, …

  • Python Cheat Sheet

    A cheat sheet for programmers who are new to Python: all the syntax and data structures that you need to get started quickly. CC-BY. You can also download this in PDF format for printing/handouts.

  • Software Selection Methodology for Libraries

    We created this Software Selection Methodology (SSM) as part of a project for Lyrasis, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more background on this project read the Lyrasis press release or visit the project website http://foss4lib.org/   The full SSM doc is available as PDF     Or free to edit as a …

  • Lyrasis launches FOSS4LIB

    We are pleased to report that LYRASIS recently announced the launch of FOSS4LIB (Free/Open Source Software for Libraries), a website dedicated to providing guidance about open source software for the library community. Cottage Labs contributed to this project with the publication of the Software Selection Methodology (SSM) for Libraries.   From the Lyrasis press release: …

  • Cottage Labs at the Centre for Creative Collaboration

    As of last week Cottage Labs has become a member of the Centre for Creative Collobaration. The Centre is a space designed to encourage new types of collaboration using the principles of open innovation. We are excited to be a part of it and see what develops. The Centre for Creative Collaboration is an initiative …

  • Identifiers Reports

    Two reports on technology and issues surrounding Researcher Identifiers for JISC

  • Duo

    Building a new repository system integrated with Norwegian national research information infrastructure using DSpace, with the University of Oslo

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We don’t sell products, we trade our skills – we do open source software development and consultancy supported by data and business process analysis.

news and reports

A lot of what we do is publicly available, either direct from us or the people we work with. We try to tell everyone about the things we get up to, and you can catch up with our latest exploits – just check out our reports, news, or filter by any of our other tags.

working with us

We don’t have any employees, but we are a partnership; and we would like to meet new people who are interested in working with us. If you are interested in doing some dev, analysis, admin, management – or anything you think you can convince might be useful and fun, just give us a shout.

our projects

We have a whole lot of projects done, in progress, and on the way. We mostly work on projects related to scholarship and research – think everything from educational tools, technical reports, to research data management platforms.

who we are

We started Cottage Labs in 2010 so that we could focus on doing useful stuff for research and education. We remain part of the scholarly community by building several relationships rather than maintaining one unique affiliation.

get in touch

We work with research groups, universities, funding councils, and some commercial companies; if there is something we might be able to help you with, just send us a message, we’d be glad to talk about it.

Every thing we make is open source – that means free. All you have to pay us for is the time we spend helping you, not for licensing; no matter how many copies you want, or how many people use the things we make.

Everyone relies on information to do their job, and that increasingly means everyone uses software tools to process information. But why is it that those tools require licenses? Why is it that publicly funded information may be restricted?

We can help you do it a different way; instead of getting caught up in licensing, we can help you build the things you need and share them with your community.

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