PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 8
News
Let’s start with some impressive stats from Hindawi's experiment with Writefull (think Grammarly for academic papers) which asked authors to run their papers through the tool during submission. Average time to accept papers reduced by 20 days and 0.5 fewer rounds of review. [Possible you might be able to watch recording here]
Following the footsteps of Springer Nature, ResearchGate and Wiley announce cooperation agreement and that Wiley will no longer be a member of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing.
David Worklock highlights 3 services, covid19.researcher.life, OASPA Rapid Review initiative and Readcube’s COVID-19 Research Pass (CRP) programme which he describes as passing “the test of market-tuned usefulness”.
Jessica Polka’s data-rich slides from the STM Annual US meeting provide a nice summary of the current state of play with preprints.
Lettie Conrad and Tim Lloyd write about why academic publishers have not invested in user identity management but why they now need to. On a similar theme but coming from a very different perspective A Media Operator writes about why publishers should be collecting as much information about their users as they can with some examples from The Washington Post’s Zeus product. [See second part of post].
OASPA has chosen to partner with ELITEX, a boutique IT company based in Lviv, Ukraine, to build the OA Switchboard MVP [Press release]
STM launched its latest edition of Tech Trends with a central focus on the user.
Product launches and new releases
eLife, via Preprint Review, are offering authors the opportunity to have eLife review their work directly on bioRxiv, and, simultaneously, consider the work for publication in the journal.
Underline, which claims to be “the world’s first repository platform for cutting-edge scientific lectures, research, discussions and conference live-streaming” has launched with a robotics/AI focus.
Octopus “the new way to publish your scientific ideas, findings and research” is in beta and seeking feedback. Given the declining rates of commenting on PLOS papers I’m not convinced the rating part of this service will work but the visualization/linking of the various component parts of the research process is novel.
Clarivate has added open access data to Journal Citation Reports to ”increase transparency around how much of the scholarly literature is published using the gold OA model, and how much of this content is being cited.”
2Dsearch have a new release including support for Lens.org and Yandex. Also see Aaron Tay’s post on how to use 2D search to visualize and construct complex nested Boolean queries.
SPi Global have launched OntoSpeak - a free fortnightly newsletter on Taxonomy, Thesauri and Ontology, and Semantic Publishing
Exciting news for those of us of a certain age with time on our hands... The Teletext Archive has launched!
Longer reads
The Dimensions team have put together an interesting data-driven summary of how they think technology will influence research.
Seven talks on journalism innovation that you should watch from the Hacks/Hackers London community compiled by Francesco Zaffarano
Adam Day on how to measure the success of an automated peer reviewer recommender system. See also comments on Twitter.
Ram Gopal et al. suggest that analysis of a web site’s third party service, rather than content analysis and fact-checking, is an effective way to identify Fake News and Clickbait websites. [Paper | easier to read summary]
Events, surveys and other opportunities
The Open Publishing Fest calendar is now available with a huge variety of sessions
Vlogbase (AI Video Search software) are applying for a grant so that they can put university lectures online for students in AI-searchable form. If you’re interested in having your lectures AI'd head to Twitter.
FutureText Publishing is running a student competition for articles on the future of text: “What do YOU feel the future of text will be or can be? We are not looking for research or journalistic perspectives, we are looking for personal passions, whether it be for text on screens or text on paper, whether it be for typefaces, hypertext linking, libraries, neuroscience, books or social media–whatever you feel is important to write about and think about.”
Elsevier is looking for researchers and clinicians to join its Publishing Lab “By participating in the Publishing Lab, you will be directly involved in new publishing concepts, can help shape these up, or even propose ideas that we haven’t thought of yet. With the Publishing Lab we aim to develop tools and services that help researchers with their everyday tasks by soliciting direct feedback from a wide range of our authors, reviewers and editors, in all stages of their careers.”
Light relief
I ❤️ this correction notice! It must have kept a few people busy during lockdown. Via @NathanSRuiz