PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 7
Launches
ProQuest have launched a new text and data mining solution, ProQuest TDM Studio, for researchers. [Press release]
Enago has announced the launch of TRINKA, an AI writing assistant. “Built by linguists, scientists, and language lovers, TRINKA finds and corrects thousands of complex writing errors instantly…. Trinka is purpose-built for academic and technical writing with the most exhaustive technical spelling list, style guide integration, and formal tone usage.”
Sherpa Romeo (aggregator of journal OA policies, publisher copyright and archiving policies) have a lovely new version of their website and are seeking feedback about functionality and usability.
PubPub, the open source collaboration platform built by the Knowledge Futures Group, has partnered with AfricArXiv, the African preprint repository, to host audio/visual preprints. Africarxiv.pubpub.org will enable multimedia submissions around research outputs, including community participation and feedback for and from researchers. [Press release]
News
Sarah Greaves from Hindawi has a nice post summarising their new initiatives with Writefull, Morressier, CCDC, ChemRxiv, Dryad and their open source peer review system, Phenom.
David Comeaux and Emily Frank test the usability of non-DRM ebook platforms JSTOR, Wiley, Springerlink and ProjectMUSE. [H/T Aaron Tay] “The students we observed encountered difficulty navigating and searching for information on the e-book platforms we tested.” so there’s some way to go before publishers get this right.
NISO has formally launched its work to develop the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) as an ANSI/NISO standard. Journals adopting CRediT can add their details to this spreadsheet.
eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview are asking for volunteer reviewers with suitable expertise to add their names to a “rapid reviewer list“ to maximize peer review efficiency during COVID-19 pandemic. [Press release]
JournalismAI has an interesting series of interviews with women working at the intersection of journalism and artificial intelligence. This interview features Viktoriia Samatova, the Managing Director of the Applied Innovations Team at Reuters Technology, and discusses her role at Reuters, value neutrality when working with AI and her thoughts on how the journalism industry is changing.
Remote access
The coronavirus lockdown is highlighting long standing problems with remote access to subscription content. Federated access, the RA21 standard and the resulting SeamlessAccess service should make things easier for researchers but, for a variety of reasons, federated access adoption has been low particularly in the US. Ralph Youngen, from the American Chemical Society, describes how enabling federated access led to “incredible increase of more than 2,600% in the use of federated access in March.” and is projected to increase over 5000% in April (although they did start from almost nothing).
Get Full Text Research has a new program director, Chris Shillum, and has announced that Dimensions, Figshare, Symplectic, ReadCube Papers and Mendeley have started their pilots of the service.
Trends
Francesco Marconi, WSJ R&D chief, has uploaded his presentation ‘45 ways AI is being used in Journalism’ with real-world use cases for things like document mining, dynamic paywalls, AI anchormen and NLP-powered data journalism.
The Future Today Institute has launched their 13th annual Tech Trends Report. The sections on Content and Journalism are worth reading, then try the sections on Content and Creativity, and Synthetic Media for some funkier stuff.
Events and opportunities
STM is looking to recruit a anti-piracy security consultant to review the current state of technical anti-piracy measures and create a cross-industry capability to fight piracy of academic books and journals.
The Open Publishing Fest is going to be held over two weeks in May, featuring discussions, demos, and performances that showcase our paths toward a more open source software, open content, and open publishing models. Propose an event here.
ALPSP have a new series of webinars exploring platform hosting initiatives called Case Studies in Collaboration. The three webinars will look at the partnership between Emerald & 67 Bricks, UCL Press & ScienceOpen, and SPIE & Project Euclid
eLife have announced the 15 project ideas to be worked on during this year's #eLifeSprint 🚀 Apply by May 24 to participate.
A bit of light relief
Scholarly Kitchen has a fun post exploring the stories behind some the names of various scholarly products.
Alex Klotz highlights the work of B Noodles C, Fajitas and R Beans in Google Scholar
Ruth Ahnert highlights a wonderful definition of ‘Big Dick Data’ from the book Data Feminism.