Facilitate discoverability for open science projects

[mcoster]

Description of the problem

Feature request - facilitate discoverability for open science projects

Really appreciate the recent developments that have made eLabFTW suitable for open science projects, eg. Anonymous user. We would now like to make our eLabFTW notebook public experiments more discoverable. For example, if we google a compound identifier, like an InChIKey or Open Source Malaria compound number, we'd like our eLabFTW public experiments to show up in the results. Is this possible?

Informations

• Elabftw version (visible in Sysadmin panel) : 1.8.4
• Installation method (git, docker or zip archive) : docker
• Operating system + version : Ubuntu 16.04
• Browser used (firefox/chrome) : Chrome

For git/zip installation method:

• PHP version:
• MySQL version:
• Webserver (apache/nginx) + version :

[NicolasCARPi]

Hello,

The first step would probably be to change the robots.txt file that for now is just forbidding access to bots to everything.

And that's probably the last step, too :)

I'll add a config option for that. In the mean time you can do that (works until container is restarted):

docker exec -it elabftw rm /elabftw/robots.txt

Then add your website to google, bing and yahoo.

[mcoster]

Thanks @NicolasCARPi - this sounds very easy to do! So, will Google, Bing, etc be able to crawl the public pages even though a human user would need to login as Anonymous user?

[NicolasCARPi]

Hmm yes you're right, it would not be able to because it would need to "fake login as anonymous" first…

This has to do with the "closed by default" design of the app. I'd need to add a way to remove completely the mandatory anonymous login. Like maybe a global "public notebook" flag that would be more lax for reading permissions.

[mcoster]

That would be perfect! Maybe all Public experiments are available without login and a GET query like

https://myelabftwurl.net/experiments.php?visibility=public

gives all public experiments?

[NicolasCARPi]

I think I'm onto something good. It might make it to 2.0.0 ;)

[mcoster]

That's fantastic! :) Will it be instance-wide, or could it be a per-team toggle?

[NicolasCARPi]

Well the thing with autologin, is that you have to be logged in in a team. So I was thinking of a sysadmin switch, also designating the team in wich the visitor will be logged in. So it will be instance wide but only for one team. The other teams can still have anonymous visitors, but they will need to go through the login page.

[NicolasCARPi]

Ok so here is what I have now:

• sysadmin can enable/disable open science mode
• sysadmin can select which team will be visible by direct visitors to the page
• admins can still select if database is visible to anonymous visitors

Now what I need to know is if this sounds good to you @mcoster or not. The limitation is that there is only one team that can have its experiments visible to search engines. Is that a big issue? I don't see a way around it. Because every team has its own world, anonymous visitor has to choose one (or be assigned one).

[mcoster]

This sounds perfect, thanks @NicolasCARPi :)

[NicolasCARPi]

Very good then :)