What we read this week (8 November)

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

Publishing

• Michael Eisen, eLife’s Editor-in-Chief, reflects on lessons learned from a recent peer-review trial, and describes how eLife aims to make peer review more effective.
•  Neil Jacobs from JISC describes four ways to make research more open “Digital technologies and collaborative tools are affecting the whole of the research cycle calling for everyone in research to consider how research 4.0 technologies can help improve research.”
• Ian Mulvany argues that Unpaywall Journals is possibly the most interesting thing to happen this year in library subscription land.

AI

• Creating the Symbiotic AI Workforce of the Future demonstrates how leaders can reimagine processes to “create greater business value and prepare for the next wave of innovation. In the long-standing argument about whether AI will replace or complement human beings, the new watchword is symbiosis”.
• Arthur “A.J.” Boston looks at what AI means for libraries.
• Purple DS look at how AI can support editorial teams. “Editorial teams should not to be spending time building hyperlinks, auto linking products, uploading stories. That’s what AI can do. Human writers will only be supported by AI, editorial jobs will become simpler and the average quality of our articles likely even better.”

Open source

• Phil Jones writes about What Source Code and Science Have in Common in Scholarly Kitchen. “By standardizing further around use cases, using open standards, and common workflows, there’s an opportunity to share risk and bring significant efficiencies.”
• Computing magazine writes about The challenge of making money through open source software.

Digital ethics

• Sarah Burnett, Executive Vice President & Distinguished Analyst, Everest Group asks What is your company’s digital ethics score? “Every company today must have an evolving ethical digital strategy in order to restore trust among their consumers. Lofty and hollow corporate social responsibility statements won’t work. To change consumer sentiment, you need to put solid, trust-instilling policies into practice. “

Search and knowledge graphs

• Computer Weekly on Search beyond search engines. “All-purpose search engines… have been valued at a median of US$17,530 a year (about £14,000) by 80,000 participants in a study published this year by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Groningen. Respondents were asked how much compensation they would need to give up various digital services. Search engines were valued more than twice as much as email, nearly five times as much as online maps, and more than 50 times more than social media.”
• Luc Boruta argues that PIDs Are Not Silver Bullets “There are billions of research objects that will never be assigned a PID — e.g. works published before the advent of DOIs, and most of the works that fall under the grey literature label — and objects that were assigned PIDs are not necessarily cited with mentions of these PIDs.” and writes about how  Cobaltmetrics are extending the PID Graph.
• Nature Index on how the growth of papers is crowding out old classics. Hard to interpret the visualization but it’s eye catching. “An analysis led by Raj Kumar Pan, a computer scientist at Alto University in Finland, found that the number of academic papers is increasing by 4% each year. The total number of citations is growing by 5.6% each year, and doubling every 12 years. According to Alexander Petersen,co-author of the study, this huge volume of new articles isn’t just reshaping scientific publishing, it’s also changing how researchers “follow the reference trail”. Rather than sift through large volumes of new papers, researchers are opting for middle-aged articles that have gained greater visibility and more citations.”

This colourful #dataviz shows the growth of science over time: https://t.co/EWdmD70jXT @RajKumarPan pic.twitter.com/bp8Q2yN8vD

— Nature Index (@NatureIndex) November 4, 2019