PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 18
What’s in this issue: 🆕New stuff: PySciDetect, hijacked Journals list, AIDA Dashboard, Coko’s Kotahi enables push-button JATS rendering, DataSalon add a rejected article tracking service, and Dystr. 📰 News: Code Ocean’s latest funding round, Scitrus is closing, eLife is focusing on a preprint-first future, Sheridan Recovers from Malware Attack, and the Microbiology Society’s new open research platform launches. 📚 Longer reads: Amy Brand on being a disruptor, Ripeta on bad actors, Dr. Eiko Fried on Elsevier and data, Josh Nicholson talks about Scite, Deirdre Watchorn writes about what open science means for the humanities, Katrina Kramer on image fakes, and more.
New/New to me products and services
Springer Nature and Université Grenoble Alpes release PySciDetect, open-source research integrity software to identify fake research [Press release]
Retraction Watch and Anna Abalkina have released a list of over 100 hijacked Journals [Google sheet]
AIDA Dashboard, developed in collaboration between the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Cagliari, the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, and Springer Nature, allows you to analyse Computer Science conferences, journals and research areas [AIDA website]
Coko’s Kotahi enables JATS rendering at a push of a button [Blog post I Video update]
DataSalon adds rejected article tracking to PaperStack service [Press release]
Dystr is “A new way for researchers and scientists to work, communicate and share their findings with the world”. I don’t have an academic email address to get access to the beta but I will be very interested to see what they’ve come up with [Website]
News/odds and ends
Code Ocean Announces $16.5 Million in Series-B Funding and seem to have found their market fit in the biopharma space.
Scitrus is shutting down early May [Website I Twitter discussion]. Not convinced there’s a huge market for these kinds of general search services, might work for smaller/niche communities? (I can’t stop myself doing a bit of shoulder surfing when I am in a café or library and there are students working to see what discovery services people are actually using. Last café I went into was full of Goldsmith’s students using, surprisingly, Credo Reference!)
eLife have published their new vision for transforming research communication focused fully on the transition to a preprint-first future and their ‘publish, review, curate’ model.
Sheridan Recovers from Malware Attack sharing because, as an industry, I don’t think we’re as hot on these kinds of risks as we should be, and it really could happen to us.
Love this. I definitely wasn’t this conscientious as a student, but it must be fantastic if you’re studying in a second language
Access Microbiology, has been re-launched as an open research platform. A number of publishers are working on similar ideas but interesting to see how quickly [in publishing terms!] The Microbiology Society got their original platform live and are now onto version 2.
Longer reads
Katrina Kramer in Chemistry World on why AI-generated images could make it almost impossible to detect fake papers. See also Google’s new Imagen service which they claim people prefer to DALL-E.
Dr McIntosh, founder and CEO of Ripeta on the Motivations of Bad Actors in Science: The Personal, The Professional, The Political
Dr Eiko Fried discusses problematic data practices in Elsevier in Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like … not. I work for a publisher so I guess I would say this, but the list of what Elsevier track looks tame to me. I know these kinds of attacks on data collection are fashionable but much of this tracking has been standard practice for anyone running a website for the past 20 years. Anyone working in Product Management is going to be pouring over the data of how people use their websites to track to make improvements to their service - something I think most of us would welcome. I’m more impressed that Elsevier can [fairly easily?] generate this kind of report for users.
Freakonomics Radio: What Is the Future of College — and Does It Have Room for Men? [Podcast page] Is an interesting and thought-provoking listen.
Deirdre Watchorn from De Gruyter's insights team on What does Open Science mean for disciplines where pen and paper are still the main working methods? (H/T:@hooHar) is worth comparing with a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Automated Research Workflows For Accelerated Discovery: Closing the Knowledge Discovery Loop
Josh Nicholson talks about citations and Scite in The Next Generation of Citations
Digital Science Publisher Day Videos are an interesting glimpse into what publishers are currently working on
Meetings
Tuesday, June 14 - Crossref community update: the Research Nexus
9th June at 3 pm BST - ConTech Scholarly API series
Interesting job opportunities
arXiv want a Technical Director to lead on their cloud migration
Sage is looking for a Senior Technology Product Manager
Gale need a Product Manager - Discovery and Usage (Remote)
WebMD are looking for a Senior Manager, Email Marketing Automation
LeanLibrary are recruiting for an Implementation Consultant