What we read this week (5 October 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 Technology

• Clarivate Analytics and UNSILO have announced a partnership to power ScholarOne with AI, part of a growing trend towards more automation in peer review (more here and here). At some point, we’ll need to think carefully about potential bias and where more automated decision-making might take us.
• Elsevier and the ACS are suing ResearchGate.  Leaving aside the contentious issue of copyright infringement ResearchGate as has really useful for researchers, e.g. being able to see the context of cited articles saves a huge amount of time.
• There’s loads of good Altmetrics related stuff on the 5:AM blog
• A student’s reflection on collaborative annotation shared by Remi Kalir.
• DigiDay writes about how Bloomberg Media is using text-to-audio to keep app users engaged: “Audio is particularly interesting for our audience because of that multitasking utility, that is a real news use case,” said Beizer. “The delivery of journalism is changing to meet this moment, audio for a multitasking audience a huge tool in our toolkit.”
• Andreas Pacher flags a handful of problems which continue to limit the effectiveness of RSS feeds; namely a lack of metadata, a lack of harmonised metadata, and a more general lack of awareness. We’re all too aware of some of these problems – we use our own RSS feeds to power various services and they need an overhaul.
• Elephant in the Lab interviews Peter Kraker on Google Dataset Discovery, the open science movement, and his #DontLeaveItToGoogle campaign.

More on Plan S and the future of publishing

• David Worlock wonders if publishing has a Plan B?
• Audrey Williams June reports on a working paper which analyses How Much Does Publishing in Top Journals Boost Tenure Prospects? In Economics, “publishing in a top-five journal is a “powerful determinant of tenure in academia” and an “important predictor of professional success.” In short, the more top-five publications, the better.”
• John Holmwood argues it is important to recognise that open access is itself being promoted in the name of commercial interests, including new, for-profit disrupters but also the large publishing conglomerates capturing the production and distribution of open access platforms.
• Richard Horton editor-in-chief of The Lancet wants to know if journals serve any useful function in the 21st century, or should we just let go?
• CCC’s summary of what Plan S will mean for publishers

Health Technology

• This is fascinating, From Bathroom to Healthroom. Juhan Sonin visualises how magical technology will revolutionize human health

And finally…

• We liked this comment from Ben Evans about Wal-mart moving its lettuce and spinach supply chain onto a blockchain system supplied by IBM. Lost in the detail: the ‘blockchain’ will live entirely on IBM’s servers – so in other words, this is actually what we in Silicon Valley call a ‘database’. ” 🙂