PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 19
What’s in this issue: 🆕New stuff: scientifyRESEARCH, Octopus, Writefull’s abstract generator, Alviss, Scholarly Communications in Transition blog, Data Licensing Alliance marketplace. 📰 News: YouTube terminates the entire Cornell University Library account, news study on papermills, first overlay journal indexed in DOAJ, AI/GPT-3-generated ‘interview’ between Malcolm Gladwell and Brian Wansink. 📚 Longer reads: Is the future of peer review automated? Katy Alexander on Marketing & Publishing, the link between French postmodernism and knowledge graphs, BookTok, Adam Day on detecting papermills, SciScore’s analysis of scientific reporting quality, and more.
🆕 New/New to me products and services
scientifyRESEARCH is a new open, curated, and structured research funding database.
The Octopus publishing platform has launched with much fanfare: “Octopus is a new way to register research. It is the place to publish the version of record, enabling peer review and quality assessment and allowing the academic community to build upon the latest work.” Michael Upshall’s thoughts will be shared by many in the industry. I think there could be something powerful here around tying research to broader research problems in a more structured way.
Writefull has launched a new automated abstract generator. “Paste in your manuscript body (so from Introduction to Conclusion - excluding your abstract and references), and click ‘Generate Abstract and Title’ to see Writefull’s magic.” Press release I Generator
European research funders are considering launching a joint open-access academic publishing platform that would use the backers’ combined funding and communication powers to significantly bolster the publicly supported European publishing infrastructure. I don’t have access to the article but I tend to agree with Sam Moore’s comments on Twitter.
Hard to put Alviss into a box, part researcher-focused search engine, part publisher service to analyse papers, part expert finder. Looking forward to seeing how this service develops.
The Scholarly Communications in Transition blog. “The point of departure for each blog post are issues, questions, musings, and reflections stemming from a project on Predatory Publishing, a sub-project of Austrian Transition to Open Access 2 (AT2OA2)”.
Data Licensing Alliance marketplace is open for FREE beta testing, read their newsletter for an access code
📰News
Susie Bright on how feminist history led YouTube to terminate the entire Cornell University Library account and goes on to discuss censorship more generally
COPE and STM in conjunction with Maverick Publishing Specialists have published a study to understand the scale of the problem of paper mills. Jigisha Patel is running a follow-up poll on LinkedIn asking Which area do you think should be the most important focus of preventative measures to tackle paper mills?
The Guardian website is now available to Tor users as an “onion service”. If Librarians are serious about protecting patron’s anonymity then perhaps we’ll see a push for publishers to provide these kinds of services on campus?
Elsevier’s decision to put accepted manuscripts online & behind a paywall is causing a minor ruckus on Twitter.
JMIRx Med has been accepted and indexed as the first preprint overlay journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Press release
Odds and ends
Was hoping to see what Chris Hartgerink ended up with after his 21 days of his Build in Public Journey but the Tweets (but perhaps not progress?) on ResearchEquals seems to have stopped. I have so many projects I would like to finish I wondered if this build in public approach would work… but perhaps not…
Richard Sever twitters about how Impact Factor and PubMed are the greatest obstacles to innovation in scientific publishing.
This is both fun and disturbing an AI/GPT-3-generated ‘interview’ between Malcolm Gladwell and Brian Wansink where they chat about Brian's retracted papers. (H/T: Dr DD)
I’ve been to a couple of tech conferences over the past couple of weeks where fairness, openness, and equity have all been themes but conceived of quite differently from the way campaigners use these terms in academic publishing. There’s a lot of infectious passion in the Blockchain and token community for global equity, community-owned DOAs, etc. Sadly, I suspect they won’t change the world in the way they want but we will have designer handbags for the metaverse than can be bought via smart contracts which ensure the original seller gets a cut of subsequent sales. Also exciting to hear groups like The Wikimedia Research group whose work on Knowledge Gaps, Knowledge Integrity, and Foundational Tools is a much more data-driven approach to understanding and then tackling knowledge gaps in Wikipedia.
📚 Longer reads
Robert Schulz et al. ask if the future of peer review is automated? I’m not convinced.
Asheem Chandna for Forbes: "Where Does AI Go Next?" Chandna and several AI experts weigh in on the potential value and risks as the technology expands.
The SciScore team presents their research looking at Establishing Institutional Scores With the Rigor and Transparency Index: Large-scale Analysis of Scientific Reporting Quality. [H/T: Adrian Stanley]
The knk Group asks if BookTok is a passing fad or a lasting passion?
Adam Day on detecting duplicate papers
What is the link between French postmodernism and knowledge graphs? Read Michael Upshall’s post to find out.
Nick Tate, VP of Digital Innovation and Head of NEXT – GSK Consumer Healthcare on Setting Your Leadership Up For Success With Disruptive Innovation
Katy Alexander on Marketing & Publishing where are we at?
Opportunities
SAGE Publishing Technology Services (Asia) are looking for full-stack developers using MS Technologies including C#, MVC, SQL Server, Razor and .Net Core.
Research Associate in the field of information retrieval/user experience (0.5 FTE) “This role is part of a Google-funded research project that aims to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) and data visualization to facilitate more efficient and effective approaches to information retrieval through the development of alternative approaches to search strategy formulation. ”
Frontiers are looking for a Data Scientist (Natural Language Processing)
SAGE is looking for Product Managers to join the Learning Pillar Product Management team
BMJ is looking for a Journals' Publishing Platforms Product Manager
And finally…
❤️ this, the Editorial Board from the Mega Journal of Oncology (via @AbalkinaAnna and @fake_journals)