PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 15

Had a fantastic holiday walking along the Camino Frances mostly switched off from technology, enjoying the simple pleasures of walking, watching the vines being harvested, drinking Rioja in Rioja, and engaging with people who aren’t on a screen. My heart goes out to a young couple we met one of whom has terminal cancer. I really hope they manage to complete their journey to Santigo as planned. 

Here’s my latest update about things that have caught my attention since I got back:

New products and services

• Project JASPER is a new initiative to preserve open access journals indexed in DOAJ.

• JSTOR Labs have launched Juncture, a free-to-use, open-source framework for creating engaging visual essays.  Juncture allows you to create free and shareable essays where each paragraph is presented alongside interactive maps, zoomable images, and more. [Blog]

• PeerRef will be offering open peer review for any manuscript at any stage

• SSRN has introduced a new paid-for Author Impact Report [H/T: @lisalibrarian]

Platform news

• Six industry experts tell Tim Gillett where the future destination is likely to be for publishing platforms in Research information

• Really nice write-up of De Gruyter’s business transformation and new platform development with 67 Bricks. Fantastic stats reported: the new platform is 600 times faster, 80% increase in users and a 50% increase in page views. It will be really interesting to see what comes next.

• Wiley’s vertical integration/publishing as a service strategy continues through its purchase of J&J Editorial.

ResearchGate 

• Publisher’s love-hate relationship with Research Gate continues. On the one hand, ResearchGate has removed about 200,000 files prompted by a spate of new copyright complaints from Elsevier and the American Chemical Society. 

• On the other hand, ResearchGate will feature open-access content from the Journal of Cell Biology, Journal of Experimental Medicine, and Journal of General Physiology from Rockefeller University Press in a syndication agreement. I’m not privy to the details of this agreement but I don’t think the comments on Twitter reflect what is going on here. I think this agreement is more to do with marketing, data, and increasing usage and relates to RG’s new publisher services. Zenodo or another IR probably wouldn’t be a good alternative for RG’s services.

Content linking

• Hard to believe it’s 2021 and the community is having a conversation about adding links to content but we are. Read Todd Carpenter and then Michael Upshall. I can’t get exercised about this, news publications and magazines have been adding these kinds of links to generate revenue/”add  [questionable] value” for many years. An overlay/annotations model you can turn on and off, like this one below, is cleaner and probably a lot more useful but it’s really hard for users to access unless they know it’s available.

Tech buzzword bingo

• Metaverse: Benedict Evans on the Metaverse is a good read. Hearst’s new branded blimp “to show the potential in co-branded VR experiences to reach Hearst’s audience of young female gamers” reminds me of the experiments Publishers, Librarians and Scholarly Communications people did in Second Life. I would like to get excited by this kind of tech but I’m not. There are days when simply switching between video conference platforms is enough of a challenge, the need to set up accounts and avatars across multiple platforms and then learn how to interact within each platform doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm! 

• Micropayments: Axate, a pay-per-article and day-pass payment system for online newspapers and magazines, is crowdfunding.  It will be interesting to see if they can make this work, Blendle used to do something similar but looks like it is now focused on Dutch and German language publications. Too many vested interests within publishing companies for this kind of model to work with academic subscription/news content in the West I think. 

• Blockchain: Roger Schonfeld interviews Darrell Gunter about his book Blockchain Technologies and AI, read comments at the end of the blog post.

Interesting reads

• Michael Weishuhn on Testing Replacements for Microsoft Academic Graph

• China’s clampdown on fake-paper factories picks up speed

• The fight for facts in the Global South: how four projects are building a new model

• How Harvard Business Review is using a new social-first vertical to reach a younger audience

• Data on how publisher traffic is surging due to Facebook being down.

• Colour me better: fixing figures for colour blindness

• Dr DD on Open Access and Frontier’s initiative five  Nobel Prize winners will publish scientific articles for children

• Not tech-specific but Emma Thomas’s Middling Along podcasts will, I think, resonate with many women in Tech who are not exactly young but also wouldn’t classify themselves as old.

Books

• Thad McIlroy lists The 25 Best Books About Book Publishing some of which have already made it onto my wish list. 

• Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization looks interesting

• My recommendation would be Fall, The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston. It’s a cracking, if sometimes disturbing, tale which also covers how modern academic publishing came into being.  Currently listening to Michael Bhaskar’s Human Frontiers which is going well so far but a lot more academic. 

• Scott Galloway, The Four looks like it might be one to avoid.

Events

• 4pm BST - Wednesday 13th October - Reimagining Publishing: Content Production Simplified

• 25th - 29th October 2021 - London Open Research Week. Looking forward to AJ Boston’s talk titled “Kanye West Explains Scholarly Communication”

Finally

• This model of whale movement is simple but wonderful