PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 12

Shiny new things

• Elsevier's journals are now displaying editors’ gender in support of diversity. Great move and must represent quite an investment in data collection.

• BMJ is building out a new static front-end to their website to speed up page download speeds and development times. Sooner or later, everything old is new again. 🙂

• A new feature on arXiv.org helps readers explore related academic papers. Developed by Connected Papers and now released as an arXivLabs collaboration, the tool links to interactive visualizations of similar articles.

• Janeway now has open peer review. If only it were so easy to make changes to some of the larger platforms…

• Curvenote is a (new to me) interactive science writing platform, which integrates to Jupyter [Video explainer] 

• Kudos have launched a new service, Kudos Showcase for Publishers (pretty portal pages aimed at policymakers, educators, the media and the public).

• De Gruyter has launched a new platform built by 67 Bricks. There's a nice write up in STM News which includes a fab infographic that clearly articulates their strategy, what they built and the outcomes in a straightforward way. 

News and other interesting things

• Can we automate scientific reviewing? Yuan, et al. say “not yet” but present models, data, and analysis tools which might make human reviewers job’s easier and more effective. Try out the demo site here.

• WNIP warns Publishers to get ready for Google’s search algorithm update which optimizes for quality of user experience and could have a “wide-reaching impact”

• Emerald Publishing is the first [?] large publisher to collaborate with Chronoshub to help authors adhere to institutional and funder mandates

• Arthur Boston has written a proposal for PiePlate: a visual peer-review overlay service. I really like this idea but I’m feeling a bit badge fatigued. Altmertics, open science, data checks, methods reviews, reference checks, Plaudit, Crossmark, etc. How many badges are too many? How do readers want all of this badging information presented?

• The User Experience of Logging In [to library services and resources at a college or university]: An Introduction  [H/T: @aarontay]

• CACTUS has a summary, with pictures, of publishers adopting visual abstracts

• AI tools measure rigour of COVID-19 preprints  [H/T: @Phil_Gooch]

• Aries webinar on manuscript evaluation services which includes presentations from SciScore, Unsilo, and Scite is worth watching for an overview of what’s happening in this area.

• Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain another ISP Blocking Order

Innovation

• I am really enjoying watching Scholarcy and Scite develop their products in public. Not everything works out but it’s great to watch them trying things out and figuring out what users want. Perhaps this is why I let out such a sigh when I read Kent Anderson’s latest posts about peer review and indexing of Wellcome Open Research. Kent raises some good points but I think we need to cut these services some slack as they work through their ideas. As Bec Evans put in a 2017 post on The ideas paradox: why publishers fail to innovate. “Don’t become a cynical old so-and-so. Acknowledge your own bias, and counter it with openness to new ideas and systems to test with users. If an idea is any good — it will resonate with customers who are the experts in what they want.” I think these new publishing models are resonating with researchers but there are problems. Even preprint advocates have been disappointed at the COVID-related junk churned out and placed on preprint servers (around 20 mins in). I like James Heathers’ colourful comments about how to hold authors accountable for the “dumbshit” that they have published over the last 6-7 months. What will the community decide to do with flawed research that doesn’t pass peer review, especially research that has already gone through a form of peer review to get funding? It is retracted and hidden away, it is left orphaned on preprint servers or funder sites, or does the community do something else with it? 

• The comments section of this Scholarly Kitchen article about Why Publishers still don’t prioritize Researchers is a sobering community written explanation of the problems of trying to innovate within academic publishing.

• Nancy Robert has a short piece on why Publishers are underinvested in core operating systems where Nancy comments that publishers often have “a binary approach in its evaluation of projects – they are either a complete success or a failure, and there is not often a willingness to take on risk with the attitude that failure represents a real opportunity to learn.”

• On a much more positive note, JMIR and Gunther Eysenbach have [quietly] launched some really interesting initiatives over the years so I am really excited to see what will come out of JMIR’s new appointments which include Adrian Stanley, Lisa Cuevas Shaw, Michael Shepard. 

• Meta also has a nice article about the process of building prototypes in collaboration with researchers. Things have been quiet at Meta recently so I hope this is the start of something new.

Events and opportunities

• Coko has announced the 2021 Open Publishing Awards!

• Lean Library is hiring for a Dev Ops/SRE Engineer to build the next generation of academic library services.           

And finally…

Couldn’t resist linking to this from Trish Greenhalgh: