Nextstrain Groups

Nextstrain Groups is a feature that allows research labs, public health entities, and other organizations to share their Nextstrain datasets and narratives directly on nextstrain.org within the context of a named “group”. Groups can be shared publicly or privately. See our summary of ways to share your data for comparison of Nextstrain Groups with other sharing methods.

Note

Nextstrain Groups is still in the early stages and each group requires setup by the Nextstrain team. Please email us and we’d be happy to set up a group for you.

Pages

Each group gets its own splash page at a base URL like:

nextstrain.org/groups/NAME

The splash page consists of a group title, logo, and overview (all customizable) plus listings of the datasets and narratives in the group. All datasets and narratives uploaded to a group are viewable on their own pages at URLs of your choosing under the group’s base URL.

See nextstrain.org/groups/blab and nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab for examples of group splash pages.

Names

The names of Nextstrain Groups are kind of like usernames: the ideal name is short and simple but still clearly identifies your organization. Group names appear in the URL of your analyses and other places on nextstrain.org, such as listings of public datasets. If you have a pair of groups, one public and one private, we recommend naming the private group using the name of the public group suffixed with “-private” to clearly distinguish it.

Currently group names are required to be between 3–50 characters and consist of only letters (a–z, A–Z), numbers (0–9), and hyphens (-).

If your organization has a long title or name, you can customize your group’s splash page to display the full name even if the name of the group is a shorter abbreviation.

Public vs. private

Groups may be designated public or private. This visibility designation applies to the entire group and its data. A single organization may manage more than one group to share both publicly and privately.

Public

Visible to the general public (i.e. everyone). No login is required to see the group page or view the datasets and narratives in the group. Public groups are listed at nextstrain.org/groups.

Private

Visible only to the members of the group. A nextstrain.org login is required to see the group page and view the datasets and narratives in the group. While Nextstrain prevents unauthorized access to private groups, it does not try to hide their existence.

Note

Future changes may allow for mixing private datasets or narratives within a public group and vice versa. If this would be useful to you, please email us to let us know your interest.

Members

Anyone in your organization, on your team, or who you collaborate with can be added as members of your group in order to share and collaborate with them. Each person needs their own nextstrain.org username before being added as a group member.

Roles

Members of a group can belong to three roles. A user’s membership role determines the permissions they have within the group.

Viewers

Viewers have read-only access to the group.

For private groups, this role lets the user see the datasets and narratives within the group. For public groups, this role currently grants no additional access beyond that of non-members (e.g. the general public).

In the future, this role is likely to also allow viewing of the group’s members, their roles, and other information about the group itself that isn’t public (even for public groups).

Editors

Editors have read-write access to the group.

This includes the same permissions as viewers plus the ability to upload, download, and delete datasets and narratives.

Owners

Owners have full control over the group.

This includes the same permissions as editors plus the ability to manage the group’s description and logo, invite and remove group members, change the roles of group members, and even delete the group entirely 1.

1

Currently requires contacting the Nextstrain team.