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

Publishing

• Vee Rogacheva writes about access control in the missing link in the academic publishing cycle “Discoverability and accessibility traditionally are a library domain of expertise but in a digital world, libraries can not moderate the user experience in the same way as they can with the physical library space. Libraries pay the subscription bill and they are heavily dependant on the publishers to recognize and deliver to the researchers and learners needs.”
• Aaron Tay has a good post about the rise of new citation indexes and the impact on Science mapping tools – Citespace, VOSviewer , Citation Gecko and more
• Mario Malički et al. present findings from their study which looked at scientific journals’ instructions to authors (ItAs) across all disciplines and investigated topics related to transparency in reporting and research integrity: “Despite the recent calls for transparency and integrity in research, our analysis shows that most scientific journals need to update their ItAs to align them with practices which prevent detrimental research practices and ensure transparent reporting of research.”
• Nature reports on Elsevier’s investigation into hundreds of researchers whom it suspects of deliberately manipulating the peer-review process to boost their own citation numbers.
• BMJ’s Helen King thinks about how scholarly publishing might change in someone built a marketplace for to purchase the rights to publish articles rather than an iTunes-like service to read articles.
• Technavio has published a new market research report on the global medical publishing market during 2019-2023. “The global medical publishing market is expected to post a CAGR of more than 3% during the period 2019-2023, according to the latest market research report by Technavio.”

Research space

• Lizzie Gadd describes how seeing research evaluation as a food chain where participants are both the evaluators and the evaluated may help us understand, and solve, some of the problems inherent within in The research evaluation food chain and how to disrupt it.
• Daniela Duca, Product Manager at SAGE Ocean asks Who’s disrupting transcription in academia? and covers a range of tools and services used by researchers.
• In Comment, reply, repeat: Engaging students with social annotation Alice Fleerackers, Juan Pablo Alperin, Esteban Morales, and Remi Kalir share a sneak peek of their study of student annotation using Hypothesis  on the ScholCommLab blog:
• We came across two newish image based search engines this week,  GrepMed is an image based medical reference search engine which aims to democratize professional medical reference information through clinically relevant crowd-sourced inforgraphics and Grafiti, a search engine to discover and share charts from top publishers.

Innovation and product development

• Jim Bilton uses data from the Media Futures benchmarking project to look at media’s biggest obstacle to innovation – technology.
• Evidence-based profiles of roles across the translational workforce are now available through CTS-Personas, a project of the CTSA Program National Center for Data to Health (CD2H), led by Sara Gonzales at Northwestern University. Each profile details key responsibilities, motivators, goals, software use, pain points, and professional development needs. The Persona profiles cover the spectrum of the translational ecosystem, from basic science to clinical research to community implementation. Personas can be integrated locally to help inform local resources, training opportunities, and communication strategies.
  
• Point Nine Capital partner Christoph Janz suggests three questions that companies should ask themselves before they choose to launch a freemium SaaS product:
  1. Does your paid plan have a gross margin of 80—90%?
  2. Does your free plan attract the right audience?
  3. Is your product inherently viral?

  Interesting read about the pros and cons and freemium business models.

And finally…

Love this Kanban cartoon and the HIPPO fast track section:

Hahah. I remember this#kanban a cartoon pic.twitter.com/YCsVBf0QsB

— John Cutler (@johncutlefish) September 15, 2019