What we read this week (21 September 2018)

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. This week the links are dominated by comments about Plan S but we wanted to give a shutout to the latest Trends report from Future Today Institute which contains all sorts of interesting Publishing Tech.

Plan S

• Rebecca Lawrence writes about F1000’s support for Plan S and the effects on  academic freedom
• Margareth Hagen and Bjarne Foss write about the challenges of Plan S and the need for more strong OA channels to replace the hybrid journals.
• Leonid Schneider posts an appeal by several European scientists protesting against Plan S who worry that the plan will deprive them of quality journal venues and of international collaborative opportunities, while disadvantaging scientists whose research budgets preclude paying and playing in this OA league.
• Björn Brembs asks if academic freedom entails exemption from spending rules?
• More from J Britt Holbrook on the ‘unethical’ Plan S
• Tim Vines in Scholarly Kitchen on Plan T: Scrap APCs and Fund Open Access with Submission Fees
• The impact of Plan S: RELX weak as UBS reiterates ‘sell’, cites news European research funders seeking to introduce Open Access system

Publishing  and Technology

• Paul Shannon, eLife Head of Technology, reports on the outcomes from the Libero Community Sprint held in August 2018
• This is an old one, Nick Stockon, on the use of AI in peer review in WIRED.
• Cambridge University Press has announced that its new content sharing tool, Cambridge Core Share, is now a permanent feature of its online books and journals platform following a successful ten-month pilot.

 

Future Thinking and Trends

• The Future Today Institute has just released its 2019 Journalism, Media and Tech Trends Report with over 108 trends.
• HBR have an interesting article from Leslie K. John about companies use of personal data  and why people are bad at making decisions about their private data.
• On a similar theme, Irene Ng talks to John Thornhill about the Hub of all Things – a microserver that allows people to own and control their own data.
• Parse.ly take a look at referrals coming from  Google Quick Searchbox and  recommended content.

 

Open Access and Open Science

• Oya Y. Rieger, Senior Advisor, Libraries & Scholarly Communication,  at Ithaka has a nice post with her key takeaways form the  Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools(JROST) workshop
• This is a nice  taxonomy of open science tools from the FOSTER portal
• Bernard Rentier compares  scientific publishing to a very select and reputable travel agency that sells you a dream cruise for 250,000€.Toby Green has a preprint on a similar theme.