Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members.

Publishing and peer review

• This week we start with the news that Crossref have registered 100 million records! More about the numbers on Ed Pentz’s blog.
• BMJ Open has published a new article on the role of supplementary material in biomedical journal articles. The conclusions were, authors, peer reviewers and readers agree that supplementary materials are useful. Supplementary tables and figures were favoured over reporting checklists or raw data for reading but not for study replication. Journals should consider the roles, resource costs and strategic placement of supplementary materials to ensure optimal usage and minimise waste.

• Will research preprints improve healthcare for patients? Early publication of research findings without peer review could speed up knowledge dissemination and changes to clinical practice, argue Harlan M Krumholz and Joseph S Ross. But Catherine M Otto worries that publication without that quality control has the potential to confuse and cause harm

• Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva notes how not all academics are comfortable with open peer review and that this may prevent the open review system from being truly inclusive.

• Jonathan P Tennant ‘summarise the current ebb and flow around changes to peer review and consider its role in a modern digital research and communications infrastructure and suggest why uptake of new models of peer review appears to have been so low compared to what is often viewed as the ‘traditional’ method of peer review. ‘

Continue reading “What we read this week (28 September 2018)” →