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

Publishing

• Let’s start with Sci-Hub, always a hot topic of conversation with publishers, the latest is that  French ISPs have been ordered to block Sci-Hub and LibGen.
• Jure Triglav has a nice list and comments about a range of innovations in scientific publishing
• Stuart Buck argues that the focus on open access misses the point and that journals need to improve their quality standards more than they need to change business models.

On the theme of publishers switching to workflow businesses:

• Lindsay Ellis writes about how Elsevier’s Presence on Campuses Spans More Than Journals and that this has some scholars worried.
  “It just got me thinking,” [Colleen Lyon] said. Elsevier had it all: Institutional repositories, preprints of journal articles, and analytics. “Elsevier, Elsevier, Elsevier, Elsevier, Elsevier.”
• On a similar theme SPARC’s (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) new report on the transition of some publishers from  moving from content-provision to data analytics and what this might mean for the future of academic publishing:
  “We are at a critical juncture where there is a pressing need for the academic
  community – individually and collectively – to make thoughtful and deliberate
  decisions about what and whom to support – and under what terms and conditions.
  These decisions will determine who ultimately controls the research and education
  process; and whether we meaningfully address inequities created by legacy players
  or simply recreate them in new ways. These decisions will shape libraries’ role in the
  scholarly enterprise, now and for the future.”
• Whilst the tone and questions might be a little inflammatory Richard Poynder’s questions for eLife raise some interesting questions about the future of open scholarly infrastructure, how it will be funded, and how it will compete against the larger players such as Elsevier.

The robots are definitely coming…

• In Nature Toolbox Andy Extance asks how AI technology can be used to tame the scientific literature
• Springer Nature has published its first machine-generated book, which it claims is “a compelling machine-generated overview about the latest research on lithium-ion batteries, automatically compiled by an algorithm developed in collaboration with the Applied Computational Linguistics lab of Goethe University Frankfurt/Main (Germany)”
• BBC News Labs’ Roo Hutton explains how they’re experimenting with semi-automated journalism to create more relevant local news stories.

Product management

• Bar for the ironic start, see tweet below, Adobe’s Experience Festival contained some really good talks on a wide range of digital marketing related topics. Recorded sessions can be found here.

The irony of the @Adobe #expfestival opening with a talk on customer experience management at scale and no one can log in. pic.twitter.com/4gevxIOxlU

— Charlotte Eleanore (@CharEleanore_) April 3, 2019

And finally….

Liz Fosslien and Mollie West-Duffy  have spent the last three years studying the science of emotions on the job for our new book, No Hard Feelings. We particularly liked their hierarchy of remote work needs:

More in this MIT Sloan Review article.