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

Publishing

• Seven ways robots are being used by publishers and newsrooms does what is says on the tin and gives examples of how writing articles, drafting content, spotting trends, fact checking, personalization, improving workflows and creating new customer experiences are being automated.
• Digital Content Next describes how artificial intelligence and automation are hard at work in the media business
• Ruben Verborgh and Miel Vander Sande write about the semantic web’s identity crisis. As journal publishers we’ve flirted with semantic web technology and thought about creating a BMJ version of the SN SciGraph but it wasn’t clear who would use the data.
• Jeff John Roberts writes about a new micropayment service from Kik and Facebook’s Project Libra in Forbes. Will micropayments in publishing ever take off?

Open Research

• The Health Innovation Scanner, a free, open, digital tool that scans large-scale datasets to map health innovation ecosystems across a range of global contexts looks awesome. Their goal is to enable users to explore the latest health research, as well as activity across health-orientated startups and social networking across the world.
• The Wellcome’s new Open Research Fund wants to support researchers who want to develop and test innovative ways of making health research open, accessible and reusable with grants up to £50,000.
• The Forum for European Philosophy explores whether the replication crisis undermines our trust in science. Does it point to serious flaws and biases in the sciences? Or is it evidence of the power of science to self-correct? And what can be done to make science more replicable?  Event link here, the recording is available via itunes etc. but not on the website yet.

Social media and metrics

• Efraín E. Rivera-Serrano, a researcher in cell biology and virology, has some tips on how scientists should use social media as outreach tools to introduce, showcase, and defend science to the world.
• Steffen Lemke, Isabella Peters and Athanasios Mazarakis explore the attitudes of social scientists towards engaging in the online communication of their research in: “If you use social media then you are not working” – How do social scientists perceive altmetrics and online forms of scholarly communication? “In terms of the perceived usefulness, bibliometric indicators (citations, Impact Factor, H-index) are clearly ahead of altmetrics. Among web-based metrics, only download counts were perceived as useful by a similarly large share of participants as the bibliometric indicators.”

• Paul Wouters and colleagues are working on a broader suite of journal indicators, and other ways to judge a journal’s qualities.

Health Tech

• Kate Sutton from Nesta shares some insights on mental health tech innovation and the need for innovations to help build real-life community connections rather than relying on individual action.

Product Management

• We’re always curious about what other people are doing well and how they are structuring their product teams. There’s a nice interview with Jonathon Milnes, Product Designer at the FT about his work on Medium.

And finally…

A video from 1974 showing what kids thought the year 2000 would be like, a single European currency, voice activated doors, flat screen interactive TVs,  they will never catch on…

#OnThisDay 1974: Blue Peter showcased the winning entries in its Year 2000 design competition.

Oh, what BBC Archive wouldn’t give to live under the sea, with a space wallet stuffed full of EMUs… pic.twitter.com/7Y6Cx1vNUS

— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) February 18, 2019