PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 16
I put together most of this newsletter in early November and then ‘stuff’ and other priorities got in the way. In the nick of time, I’ve finally got around to finishing it to clear the decks for 2022.
Discovery, knowledge graphs, and literature searching
The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications by Markus Strasser is a really good read on the problems of extracting insights from biomedical papers, how academic literature search works, the difficulties associated with finding a market that would pay, the product management lifecycle, etc. Summary: “Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web”.
As if to prove the point, Meta, the Canadian scientific literature analysis company that was founded in 2009 and bought by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in 2017, will shut down by 2022. [Motherboard article]
DataCite has received funding for a proof of concept project to tackle some of the problems raised by Markus Strasser. “Although formally published research papers remain the most important means of communicating science today, they do not provide a sufficient amount of information to fully evaluate scientific work. There is typically no mechanism to easily link to experimental design the research data or analytical tools that were used, preventing researchers from being able to fully understand the results of the research, replicate the results, or decisively evaluate and reuse existing research. [This project aims] to address this problem by developing an exemplar workflow and ecosystem that will assist teams in adhering to FAIR principles for making all research outputs available.”
The new OpenAIRE research graph dump is available in Zenodo.
GoTriple, an innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery platform for the social sciences and humanities has launched. They are looking for early testers to try out the Beta version of the platform (30 Euro reward for 24 randomly chosen participants).
The Internet Archive has released the first version of a citation graph dataset, named refcat, which contains over 1.3B citations. [Paper I GitLab]
Elicit is a GPT-3 powered research assistant which helps you “classify datasets, brainstorm research questions, and search through publications.” H/T Aaron Tay. [Video I Blog]
AI2 has launched a new Research Dashboard (article recommendation service). I’ve been having a play around trying to get recommendations for literature on research integrity. Far more misses than hits so far but I haven’t spent a lot of time on the setup or started marking articles as “not relevant”. Seems to be indexing things like open peer review PDFs as the actual paper which I am finding a bit irritating but it’s early days.
CABI has launched searchRxiv. “This allows researchers to report, store and share their searches consistently. This helps with the review and re-use of existing searches, making research quicker and easier.” [Press release]
Launches
Springer Nature is now offering researchers the opportunity to have their books auto-translated free of charge.
Article Finder Network. Looks similar to #ICanHazpdf
ReviewerCredits, in collaboration with the University of Valencia, has launched the Reviewer Contribution Index (RCI) metric to measure the contribution of reviewers using three parameters, review report length, review report delivery time, and alignment of reviewer recommendation to an editorial decision.
Cassyni, aims to help academics run and keep track of and claim credit for conducting research seminars worldwide. [Nature summary]
Semantic Scholar has released a prototype of papertohtml.org, which converts PDFs to HTML for an improved reading experience and to tackle accessibility concerns.
The Data Licensing Alliance (DLA) have launched a new newsletter called Verse about the latest or relevant happenings in the world of STEM data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
Short reads
The consultants from 67 Bricks review what they have learned in 2021
Angela Cochran on the consolidation of vendors: The Future State of Our Scholarly Publishing Vendors
Aaron Tay has a fantastic summary of OA Week 2021.
Longer reads
Scott Galloway on the Imminent collapse of digital advertising. ”Digital ad fraud could be a $150 billion business by 2025, which would make it the largest criminal enterprise after the drug trade”. He suggests externally imposed and enforced industry standards on transparency in advertising and a tax on algorithms that serve ads and content.
E.R. Truitt in Surveillance, Companionship, and Entertainment: The Ancient History of Intelligent Machines looks at how artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots have been used to serve the needs of the powerful for thousands of years.
Adam Satariano and Mike Isaac write about Facebook’s infrastructure to keep toxic material off its platform, much of it is run by the consulting firm Accenture.
Listen to Matthew Hayes from Lean Library and Martha Sedgwick from Sage Publishing talk about Librarian Futures, a white paper based on the survey, that was published by SAGE in early November.
Odds and ends
Nick Hagar and Nicholas Diakopoulos found that no single feature of a headline’s writing style makes much of a difference in forecasting success. “A/B test your headlines to find the right one to optimize traffic in the given context and moment, but be cautious about trying to divine general writing lessons from those tests.”
Laura Klein on empathy theater: You aren’t your user
Nose through the usage stats for ebooks/ebook platforms provided by the ebooks@cambrige team at Cambridge University
Do you know your Bullciting from your Thanks-a-millioning or your Lacknowledging from your Snorkeling? Justin Weinberg and Jordi Cat on Citations and the Ethics of Credit
A Conversation with Ziyad Marar, President of Global Publishing at Sage about leadership and his career
And finally…
A couple of wonderfully creative Christmas videos:
Scrooge has a moment of enlightenment and buys Consonance for his team
SciScore Movies present… the SciScore Christmas video