The BioGPS team has been working hard behind the scenes to ensure that BioGPS is up-to-date with the latest Django code base and that some of the broken features have been either fixed or improved.

Aside from improved stability, users should now be able to use social logins via their:

  • google account (this feature had been broken, but is now fixed)
  • facebook account (new feature)
  • twitter account (new feature)
  • ORCID id (new feature)

We now use oauth2 for social logins, which fixes the social login via google that had been broken for awhile (google had dropped support for openid and moved to oauth2). Since moving to oauth2 for social authentication, logging in via facebook, twitter, and ORCID id are now supported. We’re especially pleased to support social authentication via ORCID ids because they are an important solution for scientists who have common names or change their names.

If you haven’t heard of ORCID id’s, here are just two of many examples where they are extremely valuable:
1. You have a common last name and first initial, and want people to be able to find YOUR research. Take for example, the issue of searching for BioGPS’s Chunlei Wu’s work. You will get a lot of articles by ‘Wu C’ in a pubmed search, but they can be a number of different people. The ORCID id enables you to find work by a specific researcher.
2. You got married and ended up changing your last name. ORCID ids provide your research persistent associations with you even if your name changes.

As a gene portal system that aims to make things easier for our users, we’re pleased to have social login up and running again with even more accepted sources.

Try it out for yourself today!