Launches

Open Access Button has launched Shareyourpaper.org to help authors with self-archiving/Green Open Access. More details on the OA Button blog.
The Knowledge Futures Group has launch a new publication called The Commonplace “to discuss the digital infrastructure and policies needed to distribute, constellate, and amplify knowledge for the public good.”
ACS Publications launched SciMeetings, a virtual science-sharing platform developed by Morressier to publish abstracts accepted for the canceled spring ACS national meeting in Philadelphia
Cambridge Open Engage from Cambridge University Press, has officially launched. Built in-house the platform will host preprints, presentations, working papers, conference posters and grey literature. More details here.

Publishing tech news

The presentations from the OpenAthens Access Lab conference are now online. I particularly enjoyed Sam Herbert’s talk entitled ‘How to modernise your knowledge for the digital age’ and his summary slide showing tech development areas for data-driven info products.
Simon Owens explores why The New York Times bought a text-to-audio app Adum. The article quotes Danish magazine Zetland’s rapid growth in audio article usage: “In two months 40% of the consumption was audio, in less than 6 months it was 50%... Today 70 percent of the consumption is the audio version of the articles.”
Todd McGee on the rapid growth of MedRxiv: “In November this site served 270K page requests. In January traffic had climbed to 1.3M page requests. In March this site served more than 15M pages.”
FedScoop reports on how America’s NSF is using data science and blockchain to streamline federal grant processing. “What NSF ultimately needed, explained Chezian Sivagnanam, NSF’s chief enterprise architect, was a way to create a mathematical abstraction, or “fingerprint,” for each proposal that could be compared to other documents, each of which typically runs 15 pages in length and includes a variety of images. However, that fingerprinting process also has to work in a way that can’t be reversed engineered, in order to prevent someone from exposing the underlying content.” [H/T: ScienceGeist]
Schoeb et al. report on how they used a ‘literature review hackathon’ to evaluate the IRIS.AI search engine in IJMR.
If you’re interested in improving reader experience the takeaways from the GNI Audience Lab’s work to help newsrooms implement audience and product development best practices are worth skimming through. I think many publishers/editors would welcome a Google Scholar version of Google’s News Consumer Insights (NCI) framework to improve editorial and business decision making.
Jaishankar from Exeter on the clash between XML and JSON
Scholastica interview Josh Nicholson about AI Advances in Academic Publishing
I wonder how many academic publishers have a strategy to get readers of free COVID-19 content to register, signup for etocs/newsletters, or download a mobile app? Deep.BI have published 6 steps they think publishers should take during the COVID-19 pandemic to build a more engaged audience.

Funding & peer review

SciFree has received 900,000 kr from Vinnova to continue it’s work automating the peer-review processes.
Researcher has received a grant from Innovate UK for ReviewHub. “ReviewHub is reinventing the peer review process in this digital age by developing a community-driven review process. With research now often being carried out at breakneck speed, an increasing number of academics are choosing to put their initial research work on preprint servers. We desperately need to develop systems to help qualify and validate that research at scale. To meet this need, ReviewHub proposes to combine the latest in digital technology with the knowledge of the global scientific community.”

Events

Join the ROR community (a community-led project to develop a unique identifier for every research organization in the world) on April 29 at 7am PT for an intro webinar covering the project scope, how ROR IDs are being used, and how to get involved. Register here.
STM and Center for Open Science are hosting a workshop on April 27 about data sharing covering how to select the best data policy for your journals, ensuring authors can publish their data alongside their article under a persistent DOI-link, helping authors to cite research data correctly, and giving additional recognition and credit to authors when data underlying research results are available. Register here.
Cathryn Baldanza from ConTech.Live is thinking about setting up a weekly webinar looking at how the industry is working in the current climate, emerging tech available to help and to continue the conversations around how AI, Data Science and Emerging Tech is transforming the world of content. More info on LinkedIn.

Surveys and feedback wanted

OPERAS are running a survey aimed at social sciences and humanities researchers to find out more about current practices, habits and issues relating to SSH scholarly communication.[Deadline 13 April]
CDL, Educopia, Stratos, LYRASIS, COAR and Longleaf want your ideas on how to improve scholarly/library publishing infrastructure. “These might include new tools, enhancements to existing tools, bridges between tools, hosted solutions, or even work on shared practices and standards. We are also interested in learning about other projects or initiatives that relate to this effort.” [Closes 24 April]
NISO have published the JATS4R recommendations for preprint citations. “In order to differentiate cited preprint articles from journal articles we recommend that a value of “preprint” is used to populate the @publication-type attribute when citing the article as it was published on the preprint server.”Public comments open until 4 May.

PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 5

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