What we read this week (26 July)

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

Platforms and technology

Lots happening in the world in publishing platform and technology development this week:

• Opscidia, a Parisian start-up, founded in July by Sylvain Massip and Charles Letailleur, has just put its publishing platform online. The platform is intended to accommodate newspapers and traditional journals that would like to move to a model of free scientific publication and open access.
• The team working on Libero Publisher at eLife share their approach and highlight the progress being made with the platform. The team are also seeking thoughts on what you think is working well for your current journal platform, and where improvements could be made.
• River Valley Technologies have announced the launch of RVHost, a content hosting platform, and the final component of their XML-based end-to-end scholarly publishing solution.
• sci.pe Endeavour, which claims to be the first open-source platform for scholarly publishing that prioritizes configuration over code has also launched
• Aaron Tay reviews a range of browser extensions in: Academic related browser extensions : Browser extensions (Scite/Scholarcy)and improvements to Zotero.
• Todd Carpenter writes about the newly organized Coalition for Seamless Access, a partnership between service providers, identity providers, the publishing community, and the library community, which is setting up a beta phase of services based on the RA21 recommendation.

Publishing

• Priyanka Pulla in Nature on Carl Malamud’s store of text and images extracted from 73 million journal articles dating from 1847 up to the present day

Data

• Rebecca Springer interviews  Dr. Lemmon, the Walter G. Ross Distinguished Chair in Developmental Neuroscience at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of Miami, about his efforts to facilitate data sharing among scientists working in the multidisciplinary field of spinal cord injury (SCI) research.

User Experience

• Jon shalowitz/Digital Content Next on how good UX is all about how quickly you can deliver the most relevant experience to the user in the moment: First impressions count. How publishers can create a truly satisfying user experience
• Esther Kezia Thorpe on the Guardian’s journey to profitability: “We’re putting the reader at the heart of everything:”
• Brian McGill writes about How badly do authors want open access? What priorities do authors really have? Bringing data to the discussion. “But the one thing I feel very strongly about is this discussion of publishing needs and desires has to start being data driven and not just based on who shouts loudest over social media.”
• Also from Opscidia, initial findings on “where do you read research articles ?”, there’s still time to respond. 

Product management

• Digiday reports the biggest challenges facing the Publishing Product Leaders: ‘We’re not resourced like a big tech company’: The challenges of doing product at a publisher
• Interested in sharing knowledge, ideas, and new job alerts with others in the London Scholarly Tech community? Join their Slack to continue the conversations with like-minded people, while helping to shape our future events.