Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ Labs.
Publishing
- SpringerNature are to support institutions with research data management.
- Interesting study in Social Science & Medicine, “I don’t see gender”: Conceptualizing a gendered system of academic publishing investigated journal editors’ understanding of if and how gender influences editorial practices in peer reviewed health science journals.
- sci․pe have put a demo of their open source scholarly publishing platform online at https://sci.pe/get-started/quick-start
Libraries
- Tony Zanders on Libraries and The Vendor Conundrum is worth a read for anyone involved in selling/supplier management “Over the years I’ve learned that there is pretty substantial distance between the world of a vendor and the world of a librarian. And the points of intersection between these worlds are actually few and far in between.”
- iNODE, the unofficial weblog of the Digital Strategies and Systems Division of University Libraries, George Mason University, has posted a full month’s worth of data about how scholars access articles at a large research university:
In case you’re wondering how scholars access articles at a large research university, here’s a full month’s worth of data from Wally Grotophorst at George Mason (spoiler: ResearchGate + Google Scholar = 30x the traffic Sci-Hub gets) https://t.co/Jdj8W4IQ7G pic.twitter.com/f3czmLrMi4
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen) August 13, 2019
Research
- Aubrey Clayton on the flawed reasoning behind the replication crisis in @NautilusMag
- Elizabeth Gadd, Chris Morrison and Jane Secker on The Impact of Open Access on Teaching—How Far Have We Come? “Key findings include the fact that no interviewees incorporated OA searches into their acquisitions processes. Overall, 38% of articles required to support teaching were available as OA in some form but only 7% had a findable re-use licence; just 3% had licences that specifically permitted inclusion in an ‘electronic course-pack’. Eighty-nine percent of journal content was written by academics (34% by UK-based academics). Of these, 58% were written since 2000 and thus could arguably have been made available openly had academics been supported to do so. ” See also Aaron Tay’s comments on Twitter.
Interesting bit is comparing effectiveness of Google Scholar, Unpaywall and OAB. Basically as expected Unpaywall has lower false positive than OAB, but GS beat both by a big margin it found 79 more & only 23+14 due to ResearchGate & https://t.co/WVH09uidfV pic.twitter.com/GmLQ1QI0aa
— Aaron Tay (@aarontay) August 10, 2019
Innovation
- Awesome toolbox of toolboxes “A curated list of the best business, design, and organisational change toolboxes built by some of the most influential companies, institutions and thinkers.”