What we read this week (14 December)

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

RA21 presentations from the STM week seminar. Maybe it’s a cultural difference but the adoption of RA21 seems to be far more controversial in the US than in the UK. Given that many (most?) UK students use the same technology to shop and get discounts for everything from clothing to food to sex toys via services like UNiDAYS, must use their login to engage with course materials and reading lists and are aware that their progress is tracked and monitored on an individual basis, and who must also login to use the library discovery system which is also tracking what they search for and read, it’s hard to see why RA21 is the subject of so much debate.
Kent Anderson critiques the design of the Altmetrics.com doughnut because it doesn’t show the correct proportions for each data source – if you were to do this the doughnut looks more like this:
The Data Citation Implementation Pilot project has come up with a practical roadmap for scholarly publishers to implement data citation in accordance with the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (JDDCP).

Create ‘rebuttal’ unit to counteract fake news, scientists told
“In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Massey and Professor Iyengar say that, in the US, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine could “form a consortium of professional scientific organisations to fund the creation of a media and internet operation that monitors networks, channels, and web platforms known to spread false and misleading scientific information so as to be able to respond quickly with a countervailing campaign of rebuttal based on accurate information through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media”.”
What These Medical Journals Don’t Reveal: Top Doctors’ Ties to Industry

MIT Sloan Management Review on what managers can learn from hackathon organizers about spurring innovation. Basically you need to set the stage and let experiments, learning and innovation happen rather than trying to micromanage it.
Horses for Sources has a blog post on the rapid growth of robotic process automation. RPA will reach $2.3bn next year and $4.3bn by 2022… as we revise our forecast upwards. At some point this will hit the world of scholarly publishing….
Laboratories for news? Experimenting with journalism hackathons
“This study explores how and to what extent journalism hackathons operate as a community-based laboratory for translating open data from practitioners to the public.”
DigiDay Why product manager is the new pivotal role at publishers. “But product managers also pose thorny problems for publishers. They create organizational headaches and upset power dynamics; they can be difficult to find and keep; and they force publishers to reckon fully with just how committed they are to acting like the owners of digital products, rather than the producers of content.”
The National Geographic has a nice feature on the future of medicine and how new technologies and ancient remedies are transforming health care
Blippar might be running out of money. A couple of years ago we had a lot of fun thinking about how we could use this technology in our journals but couldn’t come up with a killer use case and, so it seems, neither could they.