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Open Source Portal
General Information
Maintenance
The portal is maintained by myself - 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 on making 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 perform 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 first step to go into the direction of FAIR tools. It can be seen as link collection with additional information. The first major issue of open source in clinical study evaluations is finding these. People are hardly aware of them as these 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 update when it should be applied. |
| Macro | A macro is a more generic script which has typically 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 content-wise similar. 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 as these share many similarities and are small to medium single files which needs to be executed in programming environments like SAS or R. |
Information Gathering: The link collection is currently gathered manually at specific times. 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 Plans
Additional tools and programs should be included in the portal which are partly already known, but there had been no resources so far to include them. You find a listing of these in the "Other" -> "Links" section to have the opportunity to find them and to check. If you are aware of other useful open source tools, please point me to these tools, so they can be included into the portal as well. When new tools come up, they should be included as well.
Additionally, available tools containing scripts and macros should be included in the "Programs" area to have them searchable by single item.
For programs - including scripts and macros - the program header is typically used as major source of truth, e.g. when multiple editing dates are available. The last update dates for tools are derived according the last commit date from GitHub, SourceForge or similar is used.
Content Restructure
Due to content restructure, information which had been available on this page are now made available under different sub-pages.
Please find the videos here and additional links here. Additionally information about available REST and APIs services are available here and a general project overview about opportunities to sponsor open source projects can be found here.