PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 3
A weekly[ish] summary of all things Academic Publishing Tech with occasional sprinklings of Open Science developments, Marketing Tech and Journalism Tech.
Launches
IEEE has launched IEEE SA Open, a new open source development platform. The new platform hopes to solve some of the challenges faced by the open-source development community, such as lack of relevant engagement in projects, solution incompatibility, and complexity around intellectual property licensing.
UNSILO has announced that its AI-supported technical checks tool Evaluate is now fully integrated into ScholarOne. Integrating new services into established suppliers services is never easy so big 👍to the teams for getting there.
Acquisitions
Wiley has acquired job board tech provider Madgex. (Madgex powers the job boards of many academic societies).
Phil Hill reviews the recent space of consolidation within EdTech (Covers Blackboard’s sale of OpenLMS, SmartSparrow selling its assets to Pearson, the merger of McGraw-Hill Education and Cengage and 2U looking for a buyer)
Altmetrics
Steffen Lemke from ZBW Blog summarises the findings of an online survey about German researchers' attitudes towards the use of Altmetrics which includes a section about manipulation. I think gaming will become much more of a problem. Paying for services to artificially inflate your altmetrics is fairly quick, easy and very cheap (compared to APCs). At present, it's not really in anyone’s interests to look for, let alone call out, problematic statistics.
Discovery services
Anne Christensen provides a useful update/overview of commercial discovery services on the Effective Webwork blog. See also Aaron Tay’s round-up of what’s new in the world of search engines for researchers from a couple of weeks ago.
eLife has announced a partnership with fellow non-profit Open Knowledge Maps to improve the service’s technology platform. “With eLife’s backing, Open Knowledge Maps will improve the serviceability, reusability and structure of its platform while maintaining current functionality. The aim is to make it easier to introduce new features, which will in turn help improve the growth of the organisation’s community of contributors.”
Open Science
Open Knowledge Foundation is launching the second round of the Frictionless Data Tool Fund, a mini-grant scheme offering grants of $5,000 to support individuals or organisations in developing an open tool for reproducible science or research.
The French National Fund for Open Science is providing €450,000 grant funding for Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), OpenCitations and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP).
Research assessment
The impact of COVID-19 on research assessment probably isn’t top of anyone's mind right now but Microsoft Academic have done an interesting analysis to show the number of publications, particularly conference publications, from the computer science research community likely to be impacted by COVID-19
User experience
A survey of 741 students across UK universities, conducted by Blackwell’s, found that 76% of respondents said they preferred printed textbooks, compared with 18.5% who chose ebooks and 5.5% who said digital courseware. Sobering stuff for those of us creating digital resources! However, if you’ve ever tried to use a digital textbook and struggled to make sense of tables, pondered over badly formatted and oddly placed text boxes, and struggled to flip between the text and data in an appendix, it’s probably not such a surprising finding.
David Worlock in Why Innovation beats Format every time! comments that “Scholarship doe[s] not and never has lived by format . Knowledge transmission will always find the appropriate channel , like water round a dam.” I'm not entirely convinced. The article format isn’t fit for purpose, but change within the scholarly community seems rather more glacial rather than rapidly flowing water escaping from a dam.
As news publishers focus on building direct connections to their readers and driving subscriptions, the homepage has started to become more important again. Digiday writes about the Washington Post’s homepage redesign and continued focus on human curation.
Advertising
The end of 3rd party cookies means that publishers and advertisers will need to find new ways to target content/ads to users.
Think with Google has a short interview with Sir Martin Sorrell about programmatic, first-party data challenges, and India’s advantage.
Smart Ad Server has a promo (but easy to read) piece on how semantic analysis of page content can be used to allow advertisers to accurately reach audiences.