Broad Contributor Base
nanoHUB is now serving over 100,000 users annually with over 2,000 resources from over 650 contributors. While it might be sounding intimidating, the process to contribute to nanoHUB is actually not very hard, people with a variety of skill levels have contributed, and the benefits of contribution are immense. We have had summer undergraduate researchers create graphical user interfaces (e.g. Matteo Manino, Xufeng Wang), graduate students deploying their Ph.D. work (e.g. Neophytos Neophytou), post-docs deploying larger scale research codes (e.g. Shaikh Ahmed, Mathieu Luisier), and faculty share their research codes with immediate collaborators (e.g. Ashraful Alam, John Shumway). Tool authors can host the executable only on nanoHUB or release the code as open source. For the “and more” content we suggest the creative commons license.
Clearly the community benefits from outstanding nanoHUB content. Users “vote with their feet” by popularity, they rank content, provide feedback, questions, and even express their wishes on wishlists for each tool or the whole site.
Citations of nanoHUB Content
The benefits for the contributors are also significant. nanoHUB is changing how simulation tools and online seminars are “published”. The nanoHUB team works hard on providing impact numbers such as usage statistics for each contribution and cumulative usage stats for all contributions. The each contributor has on their contribution page an analysis of monthly and cumulative user numbers for contributed tools. A graphical representation for the “and more” usage will come soon. Another impact metric is the number of citations a contribution receives in the scientific literature. So far we have identified over 575 citations and begun to map them into social network charts. Simulation tools are not only being used anymore by computational scientists, but 30% of the nanoHUB papers connect to experimental data.
Advancement of Professional Career
nanoHUB publications can tremendously help your professional career: A graduating student can have more than the standard number of research publications, but can have a real engineering product that is serving hundreds or thousands of users. This certainly helps with interviews in industry as well as academia.
Baseline of an Outreach Program
In academia faculty need to demonstrate impact with their work in a realistic outreach program. nanoHUB can provide impact numbers and an outreach component of a proposal can easily be written once you have already demonstrated nanoHUB contributions.