FAQ

CFS Talk and Awards is free and open to everyone. Concept and Application Competition portions of CodeforScience is open only to legal residents of India who are 18 years of age and above and (1) who are students of an academic institution in India, or (2) members of corporations or organizations that are domiciled in India at the time of entry. Participants can represent only one team and compete as an individual or in teams of one to four, provided each member of the team meets the eligibility criteria and agree to the rules.

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier’s online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai’s Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

SciVerse is a web-based platform for discovering content available through the SciVerse product suite:

• SciVerse ScienceDirect − Full-text research article database covering over 2,500 scientific journals going as far back as 1823 issues of The Lancet and 11,000 books generating over a billion annual page views from over 11 million users.
• SciVerse Scopus − Abstract and citations database of peer-reviewed literature and web sources with over 45 million records from more than 19,500 titles and over 5,000 publishers, including millions of author and affiliation profiles.
• SciVerse Hub − New, subscription-free tool enables search across full-text articles, patents and web documents from 18 publishers, 246 repositories and over 400 million web pages. 

SciVerse applications are integrated with the SciVerse product suite and enable over 15 million users to customize their search and discovery processes. Developers can also receive direct user feedback and find future collaborators through the growing marketplace of new apps.

Gadgets for the SciVerse platform may be developed in the following categories:

• Semantic search that creates more relevant results by interpreting the context of search requests
• Data & text mining for providing better insights by deriving patterns and interpreting the output
• Visualization for providing graphical interpretation of results
• Recommenders for suggesting matches and relationships between people, entities and ideas
• Other tools that provides opportunities to solve specific tactical problems, stay up to date on information or to collaborate across disciplines

Please visit the Application Gallery to see the existing applications.

See Prizes & Judging Criteria

You can build your application in any programming language you prefer, but your application must be a gadget on the SciVerse platform, which is based on the OpenSocial specification. A gadget can be an HTML type gadget using a client-side scripting language like JavaScript or a URL type gadget in the form of a server-side include (SSI) language like PHP or another form of URI service that returns client-side code that can be rendered by browsers. The SciVerse platform currently does not support mobile apps.

To get free access to Elsevier’s content as a third-party developer participating in CodeforScience, first submit your contact info on START APP page to receive your unique username and password to Elsevier Developer portal. Elsevier Developer portal is where you create your SciVerse application project. You will get your API key when you create your SciVerse application project.

Absolutely. You can use any data sources, tools and APIs as long as you have obtained necessary licenses, approvals, rights or permits as your application may be made available to the public. The Science Hack Day wiki provides a wealth of crowd-sourced info.

If you want to compete for special prizes by NVIDIA, here is the information you need about CUDA, CUDA Showcase, and GPU Applications. For your application entries, you can add support for GPU acceleration using one of three simple approaches:

1.      Drop in a GPU-accelerated library to replace or augment CPU-only libraries such as MKL BLAS, IPP, FFTW and other widely-used libraries.

2.      Automatically parallelize loops in Fortran or C code using OpenACC directives for accelerators.

3.      Develop custom parallel algorithms and libraries using a familiar programming language such as C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, Python, etc.

Use the CUDA Toolkit Version 4.2. This can be downloaded for free from CUDA Downloads page on NVIDIA Developer Zone.

If you want to compete for the special prize by Microsoft Research, here is the information you need. Microsoft Academic Search provides APIs to allow you to build new tools and experiences with the Academic Search data. Whether you want to build your own ranking of institutions in agronomy or build a visual explorer for browsing academic papers in virology, the APIs make it easy for you to start that project. The API User's Manual provides details on the use of the API. To request an Application ID, follow the instructions on the API introduction page.

Yes. You can use your own pre-built code or open source code. Just remember to give credit where it is due. 

Developers own the full IP rights to their applications. Those who want to make the source code of their application available to the public, are advised to use the OpenSource MIT License.

See Submit Concept

See Start App

Regardless of whether you win a prize or not, we are happy to work with you to showcase your app on the LABS Applications experimental gallery the SciVerse Applications gallery for over 15 million users of SciVerse product suite. See examples of featured applications on www.hub.sciverse.com.

For technical questions about building and submitting an application, directly email developers-elsevier@googlegroup.com or join Elsevier Developers google group (http://groups.google.com/group/developers-elsevier).

For event-related questions specific to CodeforScience India and CFS Talk and Awards at IISc, email n.bhuva@elsevier.com

For general questions about the event series, including collaborating in future CodeforScience events, email miji.choi@elsevier.com