Here’s the round-up of what we’ve been reading this week written before the UK heatwave begins to turn our ‘naturally ventilated’ office into an oven and our brains to mush.

Publishing

• Sally Rumsey, Head of Scholarly Communications & Research Data Management at the Bodleian Libraries explains how complicated research sharing processes hurt the interests of authors, scholarly societies and publishers.

• In a not entirely serious paper, Nature Physics asks is peer review is ergodic?
• Elsevier has become the newest customer of Impactstory’s Unpaywall Data Feed, which provides a weekly feed of changes to Unpaywall’s open database access articles, more here.
• Aaron Tay surveys a range of  new tools for researchers.
• The stand-off between RELX and universities in Germany and Sweden hasn’t hit the publisher’s half-year results. David Warlock asks if this Is this Elsevier’s  “music industry” moment?
• Babis Marmanis, Donald Samulack, Giuliano Maciocci and Jordan White discuss the latest developments around semantic enrichment in Research Information.
• A study published in Plos One raises questions about the usefulness of altmetrics for assessing research quality
  

  . “The results of the regression analysis indicate that citation-based metrics and readership counts are significantly more related to quality, than tweets. This result on the one hand questions the use of Twitter counts for research evaluation purposes and on the other hand indicates potential use of Mendeley reader counts.”

Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open science

• Enago Academy write about G-Med, the world’s largest community for physicians.  G-Med wants to promote digital global collaboration between physicians in order to improve and shorten diagnostics, improve clinical trials, and increase knowledge and practice methods.
• We also came across Therapoid and the Knowbella Platform this week. Therapoid, from Open Therapeutics, aims to facilitate and enable collaboration among life science researchers.  The platform includes a preprint server for open access publishing, open data and a system for managing grant funds via blockchain. Whilst  the Knowbella Platform, a researcher community for open source IP projects. Is doing something similar and aims to make use of the $4T of idle intellectual property  languishing in institutions, universities, and companies by allowing scientists to develop it into new directions and applications.
• In the same space, Scienceroot wants to help science flourish and why invest in their Initial Token Offering. They are trying to bring together  time stamped scientific repositories, crowdfunding service and a collaboration platform.

Product Development

• Pinterest’s three-day no-meeting schedule/uninterrupted time to focus for engineers seems to be working.

Future thinking

• The Economist has a disturbing thought piece about where we might be heading with the gig economy.