5 Open-Source Research Tools to Support via Kivach

3 Jul 2024

Research is the backbone of progress in every field, from science to the humanities. It helps us understand the world better, solve problems, and improve our lives. By supporting research, we foster innovation and discovery, paving the way for a brighter, more informed future for everyone. Kivach could be a part of this as well.

Supporting open-source software is a meaningful way to help researchers thrive. These tools, maintained by passionate communities, provide essential resources for research across numerous fields. By donating through Kivach, you can play a part in keeping these projects free and accessible for everyone. Kivach is an Obyte-based platform for cascading donations to GitHub developers, and by using it it’s possible to send them some cryptocurrencies without issues.

Next, we’ll introduce you to five fantastic open-source tools for research that you (and everyone) can use completely for free. If you find them valuable, remember that your contributions can make a real difference in their continued development and availability, empowering researchers worldwide.

Inciteful

If you ever wanted to find related professional papers and quotes for your research, discover more data about them, and even organize them as you see fit, Inciteful could help you to do it easily. Released in 2020 by Michael Weishuhn, **this is a powerful tool designed to help researchers explore and visualize academic literature through interconnected graphs.

Inciteful uses network analysis to reveal connections between papers, making it easier to discover relevant research and new insights. It simplifies the process of finding influential works and understanding how different pieces of research are related. Besides, it offers features like citation analysis, paper recommendations per date, and interactive graphs that make navigating the vast world of academic publications much more manageable.

Weishuhn has described this project as something personal, but it’s expensive to maintain nonetheless. He’s considered receiving donations to keep it running, so perhaps you can send him some coins via Kivach, where the software appears as inciteful-xyz/inciteful-web.

Open Knowledge Maps

Launched in 2016, this is an intuitive tool designed to help researchers and students discover and visualize scientific knowledge. Developed by Peter Kraker and his dedicated team, **this platform creates visual maps of research topics, making it easier to see connections and explore relevant literature in any field. \

Open Knowledge Maps simplifies the search process by grouping related papers, allowing users to quickly grasp the structure of their research just by looking for simple keywords. Its main features include interactive and customizable knowledge maps, easy navigation through research clusters, and direct access to papers available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License —which means anyone can use them with attribution to the original authors.

The project is maintained by its own NGO, which is funded by a combination of grants, donations, and community contributions, ensuring it remains free and open for everyone. They accept donations via PayPal, but Kivach is a faster and cheaper option to send them some coins.

Open Science Framework

This one is a collaborative platform launched in 2012 by the non-profit Center for Open Science, led by Brian Nosek. It’s designed to help researchers manage their projects, share data, and collaborate openly. OSF provides a suite of tools to organize research materials, track progress, and connect with colleagues. Key features include project management, file storage, version control, and integration with other tools like Dropbox and GitHub.

OSF makes it easy to share your work with the community or keep it private until you’re ready. With this software, researchers can efficiently organize projects and collaborate seamlessly. Conferences can increase the reach of presented work by sharing posters and slides, journals can facilitate data sharing and preregistration, and institutions can provide their researchers with a unified, open-source platform.

The project is primarily funded through grants and donations, ensuring it remains free and accessible to researchers worldwide. Supporting OSF can help to maintain a vital resource that promotes openness and reproducibility in science, benefiting researchers at every stage of their careers. They appear on Kivach as centerforopenscience/ember-osf-web.

Carrot2

Carrot2 is a search and text clustering engine developed and introduced by Dawid Weiss in 2001. It helps users organize common search results into meaningful clusters, making it easier to find relevant information quickly. Whether you’re conducting academic research or simply exploring the web, Carrot2 offers a clear, organized view of your search results. **Its user-friendly interface can organize search results into colorful collections, complete with treemap and pie-chart visualizations. \

Its Web Search Clustering tool organizes results from search engines, while the Clustering Workbench processes content from local files, Solr, or Elasticsearch, allowing for parameter tuning and exporting results. The software supports multiple search engines, including web results from etools.ch, PubMed abstracts, local files, Solr, and Elasticsearch. It uses several clustering algorithms, such as Lingo for descriptive flat clusters, STC for fast classic clustering, and k-means for basic clustering, all available within the open-source Carrot2 framework.

As open-source and free software, this tool relies on community support, grants, and donations for maintenance and funding. If you're interested in sending them some cryptocurrencies, they appear on Kivach as carrot2/carrot2.

Praat

There’s a world of words around us, and they’re not only written. Praat, for instance, was designed for the phonetic analysis of speech and is widely used by linguists and researchers in the field. It was created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink from the University of Amsterdam, and released in 1991. This free tool allows you to record sounds, view spectrograms, analyze pitch and formants, and perform various speech analyses.

With Praat, you can perform spectral, pitch, formant, and intensity analyses, synthesize speech, conduct listening experiments, label and segment speech, manipulate pitch and duration contours, and more. For instance, researchers can analyze spectrograms to study vowel sounds in different languages or synthesize speech to investigate how different articulatory configurations affect speech production.

Praat remains a free resource, only counting on the support of its community, but being continually updated to support cutting-edge research in linguistics. If you find it useful, you can consider donating to their developers via Kivach.

Tell them about your donation!

You can donate freely to any GitHub project via Kivach, even if the developers of that specific project don’t have an Obyte / Kivach account yet. However, be sure to inform the recipients about the contribution. Initially, they might be unaware of the donation.

If they haven't set up an Obyte wallet, they'll need to download one and complete a GitHub attestation process to verify their GitHub account and access the funds. This ensures that the donation reaches its intended recipients and supports their projects effectively.

Also, don’t forget to check our previous articles in this series to discover more interesting and free-to-use software.

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