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

Publishing

• Shift Learning’s report into the Value of Crossref makes interesting reading at times you can see the conflict been the needs of the publishing membership and the much broader community of users that Crossref serve.
• Ludo Waltman has 3 recommendations to Crossref from a Science Studies Perspective  and makes the following important point: “While ROR and other similar infrastructure projects are of clear importance, they also raise complex questions about the best way of organizing governance, funding, and sustainability of such projects. Crossref is largely funded by publishers that pay membership and content registration fees. However, publishers are not necessarily the main beneficiaries of projects such as ROR. It seems fair to expect the main beneficiaries (e.g., research analytics providers, research funders, and research institutions) to contribute more to the funding and sustainability of these projects. In return, they should then also be involved in the governance of these projects.”
• Aileen Fyfe, Kelly Coate, Stephen Curry, Stuart Lawson Noah Moxham, Camilla Mørk Røstvik look at the history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research [From 2017]

Blockchain

• Frontiers in Blockchain has published A Review of Blockchain Technology and Blockchain Projects Fostering Open Scienceiers in Blockchain. Although there are some interesting examples given, Blockchain still seems like a solution looking for a problem to solve.

UX

• Fascinating bit of work by Iterable presenting the user engagement journey timelines for the top US newspapers:

AI

• Open AI have released an analysis showing that “since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a 2-year doubling period). Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (a 2-year doubling period would yield only a 7x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities”.
• The New powers, new responsibilities. A global survey of journalism and artificial intelligence is a fantastic report which has come out of a collaboration between LSE’s Polis and the Google News Initiative to foster literacy in newsrooms about artificial intelligence.

Watch the video summmary: https://youtu.be/p-DGp1ot0EE
Lots of interesting applications:

Amazing and inspiring! Our smart news assistant Voitto highlighted in great company in just published #JournalismAI report https://t.co/FYJTotL9kU by @CharlieBeckett @PolisLSE @LSEnews and @GoogleNewsInit Big thanks for the team @yleuutiset @Yleisradio! #journalism #ai pic.twitter.com/WLiZtbIeTR

— Jarno M. Koponen (@ilparone) November 18, 2019