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

Publishing

• Nature Physics on the rise of journals as platforms: “Recognizing that journals are changing into information platforms providing a range of services to different constituencies is likely to provide greater insights into their future evolution.”
• Martin Paul Eve makes some important points about financial support for open infrastructure in an APC model: When infrastructural support clashes with DORA and good research assessment practices.
• Sadly PeerJ Preprints will stop accepting new preprints Sep 30th 2019.
• The Coalition for Responsible Sharing reports on the number of research articles available on ResearchGate:
  
• The Disruptor Daily podcast has an interview with the founders of Knowledgr “a network of structured, open-access micro-publications shared on a public blockchain that empowers scientists to self-govern how their research outputs are judged and rewarded. Knowledgr employs a transparent, community-derived, social-consensus algorithm that rewards observations, questions, and hypotheses with KNLG in proportion to each post’s intellectual value, as defined by the greater scientific community user base.”
• Kaveh Bazargan looks at the reasons why XML should be considered the most important publishing format (more important than PDF or HTML) and how publishers can ensure what they are archiving is 100% accurate.

Peer review

• Elsevier Connect has a write up of the  Elsevier’s Research Funders Summit in Combating bias, preserving research integrity – it’s all part of scientific review including the following comment from Dr. Sally Amero at NIH: “Some of the things we’re dealing with now include threats and bribes to reviewers or against reviewers … cabals and networks of people across the country who are looking out for each other’s welfare, embellished bio sketches, reciprocal and requested favors. Incomplete conflict of interest certifications is becoming more and more of a concern. Leaks of information before the meeting, inappropriate access to our secure review site, and applications being shared outside of our review meeting.”

Discovery

• Brief notes from a session at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) about artificial intelligence and data mining in libraries.
• Crossref have officially released a new version of their input metadata schema. The blog post goes through the latest additions, how Crossref are starting to develop a new streamlined and open approach to schema development using GitLab and some of the ideas under discussion.
• To encourage further progress towards making 100% of citation data openly available, from January 2020 OASPA will introduce the requirement that members who deposit their citation data with Crossref must also make their data openly available in line with I4OC.

Conferences and dissemination

• Excellent article from a Ruairi J MacKenzie about the murky world of predatory conferences and his experience attending one.
• The Beet Scholarly Podcast Network seems like an interesting idea. Anyone know if this is still being developed?

And finally…

Great article about statistics in the New Yorker. It covers Shipman, statins, and aspirin:

“The dangers of making individual predictions from our collective characteristics were aptly demonstrated in a deal struck by the French lawyer André-François Raffray in 1965. He agreed to pay a ninety-year-old woman twenty-five hundred francs every month until her death, whereupon he would take possession of her apartment in Arles.

At the time, the average life expectancy of French women was 74.5 years, and Raffray, then forty-seven, no doubt thought he’d negotiated himself an auspicious contract. Unluckily for him, as Bill Bryson recounts in his new book, “The Body,” the woman was Jeanne Calment, who went on to become the oldest person on record. She survived for thirty-two years after their deal was signed, outliving Raffray, who died at seventy-seven. By then, he had paid more than twice the market value for an apartment he would never live in.”