Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members.
Publishing
- A new article in F1000, publishing peer review materials, which BMJ input into outlines the outcomes from a recent workshop among journals with experience in publishing peer review materials, in which the specific operation of these workflows, and the challenges, were discussed
- Logging hypotheses and protocols before performing research seems to reduce publication bias for positive results.
- Sarah Kalikman Lippincott writes about Library as Publisher: New Models of Scholarly Communication for a New Era
- http://scite.ai looks interesting. It’s a new platform that allows you to search any research article in order to see how it has been cited, specifically if it has been supported or refuted.
- Twipe Digital Publishing on how editions (bundles of content) solve the needs of users. “Editions fulfil fundamental needs of large groups of audiences, such as the 44% of news consumers identified by Reuters as ‘daily briefers’. These readers like to be briefed once a day, and appreciate the structure, completeness and depth of editions.”
Open access
- Wisdom.ai have created a funky AI powered dashboard mapping the OA landscape across over 10,000 institutions and 200 countries.
- Bernard Rentier on Open Access. “Today, the struggle is less to provide free immediate access to knowledge in the least favoured countries but to prevent a situation where only wealthy researchers can afford to publish. This would be a highly discriminatory development which, after sight has been restored to a majority of the scientific community, deprives it of its voice.”
- Martin Paul Eve has some jottings on academic freedom and Plan S/open access
Blockchain
Ian Mulvany has some useful notes from the RAVE publishing conference where Blockchain seems to have been discussed at length. The Columbia Journalism Review has a nice summary of a meeting about what can blockchain actually do for journalism which discusses many of the same issues. The final comments,
“Ultimately, the panel said, the fate of blockchain journalism may hang on on whether the community of journalists keeps asking the hard questions about how to ensure that blockchain-based journalism serves and informs the public—and that control of the technology doesn’t fall into hands of the few.”
echo Ian’s reflection, “The claim of independence, in my mind does, not hold water. I think that would lead to vendor lock in as I don’t think that publishers will implement this tech on their own, without some standardisation we are going to end up depending on a vendor.”
Innovation
Bill Buxton explains why Marcel Proust and TS Eliot can be instructive for computer scientists, why the long nose of innovation is essential to success in technology design, why problem-setting is more important than problem-solving, and why we must remember, as we design our technologies, that every technological decision we make is an ethical decision as well in the Microsoft Research Podcast.
And finally…
A pair of smart glasses that you might actually want to wear: