Samply is built and maintained by Yury Shevchenko at the iScience lab in Konstanz. It’s open-source, free for academic use, and quietly in production across dozens of research groups. The roadmap, however, is informal — features get built when a study actually needs them, and the platform improves fastest when researchers and developers work together rather than in parallel.
If you’re running an ESM study on Samply and you have an idea, a methodological problem, or a feature you wish existed, I’d like to hear it. In return for help running your study or building the feature you need, I’m open to co-authorship on the resulting paper. The aim is genuine collaboration: shared questions, shared credit, shared work.
What this can look like
- Methodological co-design.
- You’re designing a protocol and want a second set of eyes on timing, compliance constraints, or analytic plan. I’ll engage with the design before data collection starts and stay involved through analysis and writing.
- Custom feature development.
- Your study needs something Samply doesn’t currently do — adaptive scheduling, a new trigger type, a specific export format, integration with a sensor stream. If it generalises to other studies, I’ll build it into Samply directly. Co-authorship covers the methodological framing of why the feature matters.
- Implementation & operations support.
- Hands-on help configuring schedules, debugging delivery, exporting and cleaning data, drafting the methods section. Particularly useful for first-time ESM teams.
- Replication and secondary analysis.
- You have Samply data and an interesting question that needs a methodologist on the author line. Let’s talk.
What I’m not offering
Paid consulting, project-management-only roles, ghost-authoring, or services in exchange for citation alone. Co-authorship implies a substantive intellectual contribution on both sides — that’s the bar, in both directions.
How to start the conversation
Send a short email — two or three paragraphs — covering: who you are, the rough shape of the study or feature, what stage you’re at, and what you’d most want help with. I’ll reply within a week, usually with either a yes and a calendar link, a no with suggestions for alternatives, or a small set of follow-up questions.
Pull requests, bug reports, and feature ideas with no collaboration framing are also welcome — see the GitHub repository. You don’t need to email first for those.