PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 36
Introducing a new series called Big Ideas in Publishing. Plus usual roundup of launches including CompassAI, news, and longer reads relating to academic publishing & technology.
Introducing: Big Ideas in Publishing
An occasional series exploring the concepts that could reshape research communication
The publishing world is full of incremental improvements—new submission systems, tweaked peer review processes, marginally better discovery tools. But every so often, someone comes along with an idea that makes you stop and think: "Wait, what if we could do this differently?" Big Ideas in Publishing is where I ask people to share concepts that could fundamentally change how research gets created, shared, and consumed. Each conversation will feature someone who's been thinking deeply about a particular challenge in scholarly communication. Some ideas will feel immediately practical. Others might seem wildly ambitious or even crazy.
What's Coming Tomorrow
Our first conversation is with Tim Vines, founder of DataSeer and former Managing Editor of Molecular Ecology. His latest idea is, what if publishers created AI-optimized versions of research articles and sold them as premium subscriptions?
🚀 Launches
Cabells has launched CompassAI, a powerful and useful tool to help researchers and institutions optimize decision-making for where they publish.
Springer Nature has launched a new tool for use across submissions to its journals and books to detect unusual phrases that have been awkwardly constructed or are excessively convoluted, for example, ‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence’, which are sometimes used to evade plagiarism detection. If a number of non-standard phrases are identified by the tool, the submission will be withdrawn.
📰 News
“We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question” Jay Singley on suppression of specific search terms and topics in library search engines and The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search by Aaron Tay for more details.
The AI Agent Tipping Point: Why Publishing Tools Are About to Change by Thomas Cox, co-founder and head of technology at Veristage
Fascinating:
A list of sources that are ok/not ok to use for third-party RLHF training of Anthropic’s models. According to Business Insider:
“The blacklist could reflect websites that made direct demands to AI companies to stop using their content, said Edward Lee, a law professor at Santa Clara University.... Some sources in the blacklist have taken legal stances against AI companies using their content”
📚 Longer reads
Interesting to hear Nikesh Gosalia on Insights Xchange interviewing Kent Anderson and Joy Moore, co-authors of How the Internet Disrupted Science, alongside reading Barend Mons' post on The Seven Capital Sins of Open Science and Jan Velterop's comment. As the early innovators in digital publishing grow older and some retire, their historical perspective and reflections are both interesting and challenging. There’s much I agree with and much I disagree with in these pieces, and I am looking forward to reading the book.
Open Infrastructure: No One Has the Lock on Open Infrastructure and What We Talk About When We Talk About Open Infrastructure | Katina Magazine
In The Conversation: AI will soon be able to audit all published research – what will that mean for public trust in science?
“A sweeping, cross-disciplinary audit is on the horizon. It could come from a government watchdog, a think tank, an anti-science group or a corporation seeking to undermine public trust in science. Scientists can already anticipate what it will reveal. If the scientific community prepares for the findings – or better still, takes the lead – the audit could inspire a disciplined renewal. But if we delay, the cracks it uncovers may be misinterpreted as fractures in the scientific enterprise itself.”
The Accessibility Illusion: When AI Simplification Fails the Users With Cognitive Disabilities about the problems of simplifying text using AI
And finally…
From a Bluesky post by Samuel Moore
Gotta love economists. This is from a paper about researcher views on open peer review:
Exceptional issue. Thank you.