Share Narratives

Narratives are collaborative (multiple people on your project can work on a Narrative together), shareable (you can share your Narrative with specific people or with everyone), publishable (a finished Narrative is similar to a research paper, and can be cited as a URL), and reproducible (you can repeat or even change another scientist’s computational experiment if they publish it as a Narrative). We believe that you will ultimately help both yourself and other researchers by sharing your Narratives so that others can see what you were thinking, what you did, and what you concluded from your analyses. However, all of your Narratives are private (viewable only to you) until you decide to share them.

How to Share a Narrative

You can share a Narrative that you own with any set of people you choose, or with all KBase Users. To share a Narrative, click the “share” button near the top right and select the "Manage Sharing" option in the menu.

You will now see the Change Share Settings pop-up window. Here, you can see the people you have already shared with (right now, only you).

If you want to share your Narrative with everyone, you can click the “make public” link near the top of the sharing panel.

Users tab

If you only want to share it with a few people, you can type their name or username into the “share with” box. Once you have typed something that matches a name in the KBase User Database, the person’s full name will appear. Click the down arrow to the right of the “share with” box to assign permissions to that user–you can allow them only to view your Narrative, to edit it, or to edit and share it.

For example, suppose you want to share your Narrative with kbasehelp so that KBase staff can help you troubleshoot it. You can start typing any part of the username or real name and a list of users that match will appear:

The default permission level for sharing is “View only”, which lets the user you’re sharing with see the Narrative but not let them edit it or share it with others. If you want to share your Narrative with a collaborator and give them more privileges, click the down-arrow to see the permission levels and possibly choose a different one.

You can add multiple users to share with. Click the “Apply” button to add the chosen user(s) to the sharing list for your Narrative. The usernames and permission levels for the users you shared with will appear at the bottom of the Share panel.

Orgs tab

To share your Narrative with a specific Organization, select the Orgs tab. Here you can add a single or multiple Organizations to share with a group of users.

Click the “Apply” button to add the chosen Organization(s) to the sharing list for your Narrative. The Organizations and permission levels for the users you shared with will appear at the bottom of the Share panel.

When you’re done sharing, click the "x" icon to close the Share panel.

Editing access permissions

You can change the access permissions at any time by clicking the Share button again. The up/down arrows next to each user’s permissions let you change the permissions.

Note: Unless you alert another user that you have shared a Narrative with them, they will not notice a newly shared Narrative until they see your shared Narrative in their “Narratives that have been shared with you” tab or click on your name in her collaborator list.

If you are working on a shared Narrative, and a collaborator is working on it at the same time, watch for a red box at the top of the screen that says “Narrative updated in another session.” You can update to the latest version by refreshing the page, but note that any changes that you made to the Narrative will be lost, and if you try to save your changes, you might overwrite your collaborator’s changes.

Publishing a Static Narrative

You can share you Narrative in publication ready, uneditable format that is accessible outside of KBase by creating a static Narrative. Once you are ready to share the Narrative, there are two steps.

1. Click on the share icon in the menu and click on Manage Sharing in the dropdown menu. In the pop-up window click 'make public?' to change the privacy settings. Click the 'x' icon to close the pop-up window.

2. Return and click on the 'share' icon, go to 'Manage Static Narratives in the dropdown menu. The 'Static Narratives' pop-up window will open and show the status if any versions of this Narrative have been made static. To create a static Narrative of the current version, click on the blue 'Create static narrative' button.

3. Access the static Narrative and share the link by clicking on the 'Existing static Narrative' link within the pop-up window.