Did you miss SSP’s October webinar featuring BMJ’s Laragh Kedwell and Tommaso Olivero from BMJ talking about how we use Unsilo? Read the recap from SSP member, Michael Groth.”Are There Finally Real Use Cases for AI?”
What we read this week (4 January)
Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ Labs.
Publishing
- David Grotty on the accelerating pace of change within academic publishing in Scholarly Kitchen.
- We’re looking forward to seeing Scite’s new service to Shepardise science.
- A new system called LION LBD developed by computer scientists and cancer researchers at the University of Cambridge, has been designed to assist scientists in the search for cancer-related discoveries. It is the first literature-based discovery system aimed at supporting cancer research
- Why New York Magazine is selling its own technology to other media companies (H/T: Jim Longo). New York Media is part of a growing list of media companies that license their own software.
- A nice round up of Plan S plans from different countries and funders: Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers?
AI
- The Futuremakers podcast investigates how big data is transforming healthcare with Dr Sandra Wachter discussing her recent work on the need for a legal framework around AI, and also by Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt on where the field of artificial intelligence research has come from, and where it’s going.
Innovation
- BBC News Labs – 2018 Year in Review looks at what they have accomplished in 2018, as well as a couple of translation projects lined up for the New Year.
- In The Truth About Behavioral Change Damon Centola argues that Twitter didn’t spread virally across the internet; it spread locally, like a grassroots social movement. If you want to promote adoption then don’t try to spread the word virally, use the concept of contagion to reinforce and spread behavioral change.
- The Innovating Pedagogy Report 2019 identifies strong moves towards more creative, informal teaching methods – such as teaching through wonder, playful learning and even building empathy by bringing a baby in to the classroom – allowing learners to be more experimental and inventive in how they explore topics. Intro article: Play, wonder and empathy – the next big educational trends identified
- Lindsay Angelo argues that 2019 will see more blurring between sectors. Think mediation meets museum.
- McKinsey article about How concept sprints can improve customer-experience innovation:
What we read this week (5 October 2018)
Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members.
Publishing Technology
- Clarivate Analytics and UNSILO have announced a partnership to power ScholarOne with AI, part of a growing trend towards more automation in peer review (more here and here). At some point, we’ll need to think carefully about potential bias and where more automated decision-making might take us.
- Elsevier and the ACS are suing ResearchGate. Leaving aside the contentious issue of copyright infringement ResearchGate as has really useful for researchers, e.g. being able to see the context of cited articles saves a huge amount of time.
- There’s loads of good Altmetrics related stuff on the 5:AM blog
- A student’s reflection on collaborative annotation shared by Remi Kalir.
- DigiDay writes about how Bloomberg Media is using text-to-audio to keep app users engaged: “Audio is particularly interesting for our audience because of that multitasking utility, that is a real news use case,” said Beizer. “The delivery of journalism is changing to meet this moment, audio for a multitasking audience a huge tool in our toolkit.”
- Andreas Pacher flags a handful of problems which continue to limit the effectiveness of RSS feeds; namely a lack of metadata, a lack of harmonised metadata, and a more general lack of awareness. We’re all too aware of some of these problems – we use our own RSS feeds to power various services and they need an overhaul.
- Elephant in the Lab interviews Peter Kraker on Google Dataset Discovery, the open science movement, and his #DontLeaveItToGoogle campaign.
More on Plan S and the future of publishing
- David Worlock wonders if publishing has a Plan B?
- Audrey Williams June reports on a working paper which analyses How Much Does Publishing in Top Journals Boost Tenure Prospects? In Economics, “publishing in a top-five journal is a “powerful determinant of tenure in academia” and an “important predictor of professional success.” In short, the more top-five publications, the better.”
- John Holmwood argues it is important to recognise that open access is itself being promoted in the name of commercial interests, including new, for-profit disrupters but also the large publishing conglomerates capturing the production and distribution of open access platforms.
- Richard Horton editor-in-chief of The Lancet wants to know if journals serve any useful function in the 21st century, or should we just let go?
- CCC’s summary of what Plan S will mean for publishers
Health Technology
- This is fascinating, From Bathroom to Healthroom. Juhan Sonin visualises how magical technology will revolutionize human health
And finally…
- We liked this comment from Ben Evans about Wal-mart moving its lettuce and spinach supply chain onto a blockchain system supplied by IBM. Lost in the detail: the ‘blockchain’ will live entirely on IBM’s servers – so in other words, this is actually what we in Silicon Valley call a ‘database’. ” 🙂
What we read this week (6 July 2018)
Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members.
Publishing and Open Science
Slate discuss the impact of Facebook’s retreat from the news business.
There’s a great quote in this article:
“The internet is a completely different place every 18 months, and that’s been true since we launched in 1996,”
Which brings us onto Is the Research Article Immune to Innovation? From Sarah Andrus in Scholarly Kitchen and the glacial pace of change in the presentation of scholarly articles online. Continue reading “What we read this week (6 July 2018)”