PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 20
Quick post before I head off on holiday. What’s in this issue: 🆕New stuff: Cactus Labs, CABI and OUP have merged their books and journal platforms, Pearson and NFTs, Hindawi’s ML datasets, Nature Research Intelligence, Papermill Alarm. 📚 Longer reads: Michel Upshall on Scholarly Workflow in the Digital Age, ~40% of Gen Zers use TikTok for search, promoting trust in research, why we shouldn't push to do academic publishing on the cheap, Jeff Gothelf on The Truth Curve, Ruth Wells on The Human Side of Digital Learning, the most influential factors in predicting the h-index, Simone Ragavooloo on how BMJ is acting on historically offensive content in BMJ’s archive and more.
🆕 What’s new:
CABI’s new books and journals platform has launched and OUP’s new platform now includes books, as well as journals. For anyone joining a publisher in 2022 on the Product Development side of things, it must seem really odd that Books, Journals Data, etc. have traditionally been hosted on separate platforms. Hats off to publishers making this change, it’s usually much harder to do than it might seem from the outside.
Pearson Says Blockchain Could Make It Money Every Time E-Books Change Hands. Maybe it could… but maybe not… Also, see this thread on Twitter from @has_many_books
Automated screening tools continue to develop, ripetaReview has integrated with Editorial Manager manuscript submission system. I think screening tools like this are going to become an essential part of what Publishers do.
Silverchair has announced a new capital partnership with Thompson Street Capital Partners (TSCP), a private equity firm to fund growth. Press release, Comment from Roger C Schonfeld on Scholarly Kitchen
Cactus Labs, “a business initiative to empower new-age researchers powered by Unsilo”.
Hindawi is doing some interesting things with the Data Licensing Alliance to create datasets for AI/Machine Learning
Nature Research Intelligence “a new AI-led service to help research decision makers from academic, government and corporate organizations make informed data driven funding and strategy decisions, enabling them to deliver greater socio-economic impact from their investments in research” [Press release]
Papermill Alarm is a new API that alerts you when a paper is similar to past papermill-papers. Also, see this Twitter thread.
📚 Longer reads and interesting snippets:
From via Anne T Stone: “Teens are 'almost constantly' on YouTube according to new Pew research, but only 38% of university faculty have used open video lectures as part of their instructional strategies according to Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey”. And From Adrienne “As an elder millennial who came of age when Google became a verb, I had difficulty grasping that ~40% of Gen Zers use TikTok for search.” Fascinating thread on Twitter.
Michel Upshall on The Scholarly Workflow in the Digital Age
Promoting trust in research and researchers: How open science and research integrity are intertwined “We argue that responsible research practices focus more on the rigorous conduct of research, transparency focuses predominantly on the complete reporting of research, and open science’s core focus is mostly about dissemination of research." See also the Deloitte promo piece in the FT about anti-fraud initiatives in the UK. The comment “We need to bring all these brilliant people from across the ecosystem together for one single response – from reporting to sharing through to action, disruption and investigation.” This resonated with me. We need to do the same in academic publishing if we are going to tackle research fraud.
Two good Twitter threads about why we shouldn't push to do publishing on the cheap:
Peter J Olson: Plenary: Recombinant Scholarly Publishing: Challenges, Trends, and Emerging Strategies.
New study by Fakhri Momeni et al. "How can I improve my scientific impact? The most influential factors in predicting the h-index" [via Aaron Tay]
Ruth Wells on The Human Side of Digital Learning
Simone Ragavooloo on how BMJ is acting on historically offensive content in BMJ’s archive
Softwire have a new ebook on Accelerating Digital Innovation.
Jeff Gothelf on The Truth Curve… “a way of framing your thinking when it comes to determining how much to spend on your next experiment and whether or not it's even worth it to keep pursuing a specific hypothesis”
Odds and Ends
Amnet have an upcoming webinar: "Born Accessible from InDesign"
peer-review.io is looking for donations to help build a new publishing platform
Jobs
OA Switchboard need an Onboarding Specialist
SAGE is looking for a Discovery Experience Manager, Junior Product Manager - TALIS, Product Analyst and a Junior UX Designer