This page contains frequently asked questions. Before contacting us to ask a question please check to see if it has already been answered here. If it is not included here do not hesitate to get in touch.
SciSpace is a website using the Elgg social networking software.
SciSpace was created to help scientists communicate with collaborators by means of blogs and comments, wikis, shared file spaces and URL bookmarks. Researchers can also discover others with similar interests, and thus SciSpace also supports the establishment of new collaborations. We recognize SciSpace can be useful to non-scientists engaged in research and we accept non-scientist users.
Yes! Just follow the link on the front page to request an invitation to join. Once you are a member you can invite others to join. We reserve the right to remove users who use the facilities in a way detrimental to the functioning or reputation of the site.
The National Institute for Environmental eScience (NIEeS) started SciSpace and maintained the servers on which SciSpace runs until the end of its contract. SciSpace is now run from the Department of Earth Science, University of Cambridge. We do not claim ownership of (or responsibility for) the information posted on the site. We do not own the software (Elgg) on which the site depends; it is open source and anyone can download it. We also use plugins provided freely by developers. To some extent, we have customized the functionality and appearance of the site, but we have cherry-picked ideas from others and expect others will do the same to us (with our blessing).
Yes. There is a SciSpace Discussion community that you can post to.
Describe what you want in a blog entry in the SciSpace Discussion community. The SciSpace management team monitor that community and will see anything posted there. Functionality is best added to the site in the form of a plugin. A range of plugins already exists and some of them already contribute features to SciSpace. We will consider using any plugin developed for Elgg (the software underpinning SciSpace), but cannot guarantee actually using it. The main criteria for inclusion would be compatibility with both the vision for the site and the plugins already installed on SciSpace.
SciSpace is currently free to use and there are no plans to introduce charges. The initial startup and running costs were carried by the National Institute for Environmental eScience (NIEeS), which was a collaboration between the Natural Environment Research Council and the University of Cambridge. NIEeS came to the end of its contract and costs are now borne by the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge.
Yes.
If you do not have an account, visit the home page of the site and click the request-invite link. If you have an account already and you want to invite someone else to join, go to the Friends page (click 'Friends' in the top menu) and then choose 'Invite a friend' from the sub-menu. All you need to enter is their name and email address.
There are two types of account, normal and administrator. There are only a few administrators and they can perform a few extra tasks, such as adding users en masse and banning users. The functionality of the site is available to everyone.
You cannot delete your account. Though it may not at first be obvious why, deleting an account poses problems. For example, if you delete blog content the comments attached to the blog are effectively deleted also - others may have contributed significantly to a debate or discussion and wiping out their work along with yours should not be done lightly, if at all. There may be times when removing a particular item makes sense and you can delete what you have written on an item by item basis. Note that the SciSpace wiki keeps a history of past edits. Deleting content does not necessarily remove it from view. If you wish to remove your personal wiki content from public view, you can change the access restriction to Private. If what you really want is to stop using the site, you can stop email alerts (if you receive them) by setting the Receive notifications option to No on your Account page.
A community is a special entity which has its own blog, file space, wiki, etc - in fact, it has all the facilities of an individual account. Members of SciSpace can join communities that exist already or create communities. A community can be open (allowing anyone to join), or moderated (membership must be approved by the owner of the community). The owner of a community is the person who created it. Ownership can be transferred to another user, but there can be only one owner.
In the Search area of the banner, near the top right of the page, click the Browse button. By default you get a list of both users and communities combined, but you can limit it to communities. If you want to see more than the brief description of the community you can follow the link to its Profile page.
If you already have friends, the communities they have joined is listed in their sidebar (it's their sidebar if their name is at the top of it). You can click the links to see the profile pages of the communities they belong to. You can use the Search function. If your search term is located in a Profile or in the tags associated with an item the results page will include a link to it. The results also list communities with items containing the search term. So the results page can lead you to interesting communities both directly and indirectly.
The Tag cloud is another search mechanism that leads to the same sort of results page as mentioned above. The tag cloud itself is a page of words used as keywords for posts on SciSpace, and the more a word has been used, the bigger it appears in the cloud. Clicking on a word gives you the same results as you would have had by using the Search box (but the search box method gives you more options for further filtering the results).
A friend is just a person whose content on SciSpace you want to monitor.
SciSpace.net feeds content to you based on the friends you have chosen and the communities you have joined. When you make a friend you are registering an interest in the content they make available. It does not mean you see everything they put on SciSpace because they may restrict content to a particular community or group to which you do not belong.
It is not reciprocal. If I wish to monitor your content, you are not forced to monitor mine.
If you navigate to a page belonging to someone else the sidebar will be their sidebar with their name and picture at the top. There will also be a link just below the top saying "Click here to add this user as a friend".
Note that friendship can be 'moderated' which means the person you are trying to make a friend can reject your request.
Take a look at what we said about finding communities above. Everything there is applicable to finding friends too.
You can customise your profile page by adding widgets (choose Add widget in the submenu), and you can arrange them as you wish.
No.
There is a limit on the size of file that can be uploaded. This is currently set at 16 MB (but tell us if this is a problem for you).
There is also a disk quota for each user. When your account is created it is set to the default value of 100MB, but can be increased as required (within reason). Please contact us if you exhaust your quota.