What we read this week (28 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.

Publishing and peer review

• This week we start with the news that Crossref have registered 100 million records! More about the numbers on Ed Pentz’s blog.
• BMJ Open has published a new article on the role of supplementary material in biomedical journal articles. The conclusions were, authors, peer reviewers and readers agree that supplementary materials are useful. Supplementary tables and figures were favoured over reporting checklists or raw data for reading but not for study replication. Journals should consider the roles, resource costs and strategic placement of supplementary materials to ensure optimal usage and minimise waste.

• Will research preprints improve healthcare for patients? Early publication of research findings without peer review could speed up knowledge dissemination and changes to clinical practice, argue Harlan M Krumholz and Joseph S Ross. But Catherine M Otto worries that publication without that quality control has the potential to confuse and cause harm

• Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva notes how not all academics are comfortable with open peer review and that this may prevent the open review system from being truly inclusive.

• Jonathan P Tennant ‘summarise the current ebb and flow around changes to peer review and consider its role in a modern digital research and communications infrastructure and suggest why uptake of new models of peer review appears to have been so low compared to what is often viewed as the ‘traditional’ method of peer review. ‘

Openness

• Silvio Peroni describes the history of the Open Citations movement. 500M citations are now open (52% out of 40.8 million articles with references deposited with Crossref)
• Marcus Baw argues that open source is the only way for clinical software and that closed source clinical software subverts the duty to share medical knowledge, and protects intellectual property to the detriment of patients.
• Delta Think’s view on Plan S: “Given Plan S principles are consistent with those of some currently non-participating organizations, others are likely to join… Widespread uptake across the EU (or funders adopting similar principles in other regions) could see annual market growth reduce by a quarter to a long-term 1.5% annual figure.”

Product management and innovation

• Giuliano Maciocci and Naomi Penfold write about how they decide to fund and provide mentorship for development of a new products and services. Lots of good advice for anyone pitching a new product idea.

From around the web

• Mark O’Connell in the New Yorker has a depressing but interesting read on the deliberate awfulness of social media, “To be alive and online in our time is to feel at once incensed and stultified by the onrush of information, helpless against the rising tide of bad news and worse opinions.”
• At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, doctors and staff objected to a for-profit venture that applied artificial intelligence to health care that could be lucrative for the founders and board members but relies on the pathologists’ expertise and work amassed over 60 years.
• A new journalism venture, The Markup, aims help to illuminate how powerful institutions are using technology in ways that impact people and society.
• Steve Blank on why the Apple Watch might be a tipping point time for healthcare. “Although the current demographics of the Apple Watch skews young, the populations of the U.S., China, Europe and Japan continue to age, which in turn threatens to overwhelm healthcare systems. Having an always on, real-time streaming of medical data to clinicians, will change the current “diagnosis on a single data point and by appointment” paradigm. Wearable healthcare diagnostics and screening apps open an entirely new segment for Apple and will change the shape of healthcare forever.”

• “Robotics Skins” turn everyday objects into robots:

 

And finally….

How could we not mention the Lancet Restaurant in Beijing? Researchers are eligible for a discount if they have recently published papers in journals that are included in the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index. The paper’s impact factor is multiplied by 10 to determine the discount.