Open Source Portal
General Information
Maintenance
The portal is maintained by me - Katja Glass (Katja Glass Consulting). As the creation and maintenance requires a lot of resources, I am looking for donations and sponsors to be able to further enhance the portal and work to make open-source solutions findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. If you are interested in sponsorship, please get in touch with me through info@glacon.eu for further information or to schedule a phone call. You can also make a donation through PayPal with the button below.
Portal Content
This portal allows for Findable tools, macros and scripts which are related to clinical study evaluations. This is a step in the direction of creating FAIR tools. It can be seen as a collection of links with additional information. The first major issue of open source in clinical study evaluations is locating these tools. People are often unaware of these tools as they are announced on very different events and media, if at all. Sometimes there is only the word of mouth.
Definitions: Four terms are used which could be defined in the context of the portal as following:
| Term | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Tool | A tool can be seen either as a stand-alone software or a group of small programs which belong together according to their content, scope, author or other criteria. |
| Script | A Script is a stand-alone program which can be executed and immediately creates a result. It could be a SAS, R or any other script which is quite often understood as "program". Typically scripts are created for a specific content and needs updating when applied. |
| Macro | A macro is a more generic script which has typically has parameters to provide various options to apply. A macro must be called to produce a result, as this only contains a definition. Macros are typically very flexible and ideally do not need modifications when applied, e.g. to different data. In SAS these are defined as "MACRO", in R these would be "FUNCTIONS" which are similar content-wise. If a macro is included in a script, the file would be considered as script, as the file is executable and will return a result and is not just a definition. |
| Program | A program in the context of this portal can be seen as spanning definition for scripts and macros. These macros are small to medium single files and share many similarities. These files need to be executed in programming environments such as SAS or R. |
Information Gathering: The collection of links are currently gathered manually periodically. In currently hidden metadata the information is stored when a tool/program is included in the portal and when the content has been updated. This will allow users to check for tools entered after a specific time point later on. Thanks to all who provided additional information and made me aware of additional open-source solutions available. It is planned to update information automatically.
Portal Additions
If you would like to include additional tools, programs, scripts or videos or even are interested in writing an article, you can do so with a pull requests, following the instructions in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/KatjaGlassConsulting/clinicalOpenSourcePortal.