Introduction

Nature Article

Highlighted slack as a new collaboration tool for scientists
Other currently used tools are gchat, skype and email
In terms of chat/video comms clients - skype, gchat and slack are popular and the alternative is email
Email audit trails are hard to follow with multiple topics combined and doe not provide a real time interface
While chat clients have the audit trails, it is not possible to share correctly formatted equations, compiled code scripts which could render graphs

US

Everyone in our team is a scientist and we have been exposed to the challenges of collaborating in the scientific community within the UK and globally

Our tool benefits

Real time chat client with multiple channels

Could have one dedicated as a lab notebook or collaboration for a specific paper

multiple editors Text, Python, R, LaTeX and images.

This also allows for easier collaboration across scientific communities (for example, R is preferred in biological sciences while Python is preferred in Physics)
Formulae from the different editors is automatically rendered in the sent message

Clear audit trail

This is provided as every message has a name and datetime stamp.
This also ensure that assigning credit to the correct contributors is easy to do.

Real time collaboration on graphs

Graphs that are rendered with a particular editor (i.e. Python or R) can be clicked on and the source code is displayed.
It is then possible to update variables and see the effects on the graph
Note that the modified graph is displayed while the old graph is still maintained in the audit trail

Export Functionality

It is possible to export all chat history in a channel to Jupyter notebooks (exclusive python and R can be exported separately)
This can be passed to publishers and used as internal lab books

Features for the future

There are many more features that can be added to enhance the tool such as :

Validating results

Add a "thumbs up" feature to graphs/images/equations/ etc. which indicates a concensus of people in the chat that it is the correct solution

Security layer

Limit users to certain channels only

Channel notifications

Notify if a channel has new messages or if someone has joined/left the channel

Version linking

Link several version of the same graphs/equations such that it is easy to scroll between them

Chat selection

Allow for specific chat items to be selected for export/copying into another channel

Editor persistence

Enhance the tool such that clicking a chat item does not erase the editor contents