Getting started

The first hour on a hub, in order: create an account, confirm it, fill in enough of a profile to be findable, arrange a dashboard, and then find the part of the site you actually came for.

The point of the first four steps is the fifth. Nothing on a hub is much use until other members can find you and add you to things — a group cannot invite a member it cannot see, and a project owner has to pick you off a list by name. Half an hour spent on an account and a profile saves a week of "who is this person and why can't they open the files".

The example running through this chapter is a postdoc joining her lab's hub. She has been told two things: run the group's infiltration model, and get at the field data the lab is preparing for release. That is a typical reason to be here, and it needs all five steps.

1. Create an account

Go to /register, or select Create an account under the login form. The form asks for a username, a password, your name, and an email address, plus whatever profile questions your hub has added. Full instructions, including what each fieldset means and what the password rules are, are in Registration.

2. Confirm your email address

Unless the hub has been set to skip it, you are sent a message with an activation link. Follow it and log in. Until you do, the account exists but cannot be used. Some hubs also require an administrator to approve the account, which happens after you confirm.

The message is generated automatically, so check your spam folder if it does not arrive within a few minutes.

Use an address you will still be reading in two years. The postdoc in the example uses her university address rather than the lab's shared mailbox: hub notifications about her project, her tool sessions, and her publication all go to whichever address is on the account, and the account is hers, not the lab's.

3. Fill in your profile

Your profile is at Members > (your name) > Profile, or directly at /members/myaccount. Each row is one field with an Edit link beside it; selecting it opens the field in place, with a Privacy menu next to the value. See Member profile for the field-by-field detail and for uploading a picture.

Two things are worth doing straight away:

• Decide whether the whole profile is public or private, using the toggle at the top of the Profile tab. Per-field privacy only works while the profile itself is public. Which state a new account starts in depends on the hub's Default Privacy setting, so look rather than assume.
• Fill in your organisation and interests. They are what makes you findable by other members, and on hubs that run Solr search, member profiles are indexed.

For the postdoc, "findable" is the whole point of the step. The group's manager searches the member list for her name and her department to send the invitation; if the profile is private, or the organisation is blank, that search returns nothing useful and she has to be added by hand.

4. Arrange your dashboard

The Dashboard tab is your own page of modules — current tool sessions and disk usage, your groups, your projects, recent activity, whatever the hub offers. It starts from a default arrangement and you rearrange it by dragging. Member dashboard covers adding, removing, and configuring modules.

This is the one step you can skip. Nobody else sees your dashboard and nothing depends on it. It is worth five minutes only because the panels you put there are the ones you will otherwise go looking for in a menu every day — for the postdoc, My Sessions, so she can get back into a running model, and My Projects, so the field-data project is one click away.

5. Find your way around

What a hub offers beyond that varies. These are the parts most hubs turn on.

Groups

A group is a shared space, private or public. Each one can have its own pages, membership roles, announcements, blog, calendar, collections, forum, wiki, and file area. Joining an existing group is usually the fastest way to see what a hub is actually used for.

Groups are for people who keep working together: a lab, a course cohort, a standards committee. A group outlives any one piece of work in it.

Projects

A project is a workspace for a piece of research: files, notes, a to-do list, and a database area. Project file storage can be the hub's own, or connected to Amazon S3, Dropbox, GitHub, or Google Drive through the hub's filesystem plugins. When the work is ready, a project is the starting point for a publication.

A project is not a group. It is private to the people invited to it, it is about one body of work, and it exists partly so that data can be shared inside the team before anyone is ready to show it to the world. The lab's field data lives in a project for exactly that reason: three people are cleaning it, and nothing is public until they say so.

Publications

Publications walks a contributor through releasing data, code, or a paper in steps — files, authors, abstract, licence — that can be revisited in any order. A published version can carry a licence and a minted DOI. Where the hub uses curation, a curator reviews the draft and leaves notes before it goes live; see Curation.

This is where the lab's field season ends up: the project is the workspace, the publication is the citable thing with a version number that a paper can point at.

Tools

Where a hub runs the tool platform, published tools launch in the browser and execute on the hub's own machines. Running one, sharing a session, and contributing your own are covered in Tools.

Nothing is installed on your computer, and a session keeps running when you close the browser, which is why the postdoc can start the infiltration model on a laptop and pick the session up the next morning from My Sessions.

Wiki and collections

The wiki holds member-written articles; an article's author can keep a fixed list of authors or leave it open for anyone to edit. Collections are a lighter way to gather images, links, and files into a board that other members can follow and re-collect. A collection is not a publication: it points at things, it has no version and no DOI, and nobody curates it.

What is not here

The tool execution platform, the Solr search service, and the statistics collection behind the hub's /usage page are separate software that runs alongside the CMS. Chapters that depend on them say so, because on a hub where they are not installed the corresponding pages are empty or absent.