@chrisdc77 – BMJ Labs

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ Labs.

Epic series of tweets from Chris Chambers (@chrisdc77) about understanding the role of press releases in science news. New BMC Medicine paper here. The upshot? “Making claims in press releases more cautious, & aligning them with the actual study design of the journal article, is *associated* with better quality news. And, importantly, it doesn’t kill off media interest.”
Interesting post on the Online Journalism Blog about the need for better guidelines on reporting uncertainty when using AI in journalism. It digs into the details of the BBC article about dialogue and gender in Game of Thrones where the data had been created by a company specializing in the use of machine learning to analyse diversity in popular culture.

Dalmeet Singh Chawla suggests that pressure to publish may be averting researchers from pursuing out-of-the-box, groundbreaking science.
Lots of data from Prolifiko about academics, how they feel about writing and what’s holding them back, definitely work a quick click through for an interesting perspective of the needs of academic authors. Perhaps the pressure to publish is not so great?:
Peer Community In… has created a handy list of how their service differs from other new publishing services like Overlay Journals, SciPost, F1000 Research, PreLights, etc.
Arthur Boston explores how Open Citation and Open Peer Review could be key components toward reformed evaluative practices in a new preprint on Humanities Commons.
Also on the theme of citation, Bridgit a new startup, is aiming to connect information on the web using community built overlays:
Apparently Quora is now a $2 billion company! “The company told some prospective investors that it did about $20 million in 2018 revenue, which makes a $2 billion valuation a pretty enormous 100x multiple of its prior year’s revenue.”
Reducing subscriber friction: New universal login format in WNIP shows how newspaper publishers are trying to make their login journeys easier and how adopting the new WebAuthn standard might make the process seamless for users.