What we read this week (6 December)

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

Publishing

• ACS, Elsevier, Taylor Francis, SpringerNature, and Wiley have launched Get Full Text Research (GetFTR). A new, free to use solution that enables faster access for researchers to the published journal articles they need. “To create a seamless experience, researchers will be taken directly to the article, and just the article, from a wide variety of discovery tools that they are already using. Even if a researcher does not have the relevant institutional access to an article, publishers can provide an alternative version of the content. Importantly, GetFTR enables users to access content in this way both off-campus and on-campus.” This has triggered a variety of responses:
  – ‘Publishers Announce a Major New Service to Plug Leakage’ (Jeff Pooley)
  – Publishers going-it-alone (for now?) with GetFTR (Peter Murray)
  – >Get To Fulltext Ourselves, Not GetFTR (Open Access Button)
  – Publishers Announce a Major New Service to Plug Leakage(Robert Schonfeld)
• Europe PMC has unveiled a new website packed with useful features. The improved Europe PMC offers a better search and reading experience, as well as better access to data.
  
• Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea , Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado-López-Cózar, analyse the relative coverage of the three main research databases, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus and finding significant divergences in the social sciences and humanities and suggest that researchers face a trade-off when using different databases: between more comprehensive, but disorderly systems and orderly, but limited systems.

AI and Machine Learning

• Jim Longo, VP Product & Development, HighWire outlines the A.I. partners HighWire are currently working with, and the use-cases they are tackling.
• Peter Sjögårde on The challenge of categorizing research “Assigning publications to research fields can be a challenge. While the demarcation of fields can be supported by algorithms, labeling fields properly requires to know what holds them together. I investigated this problem and discovered interesting reasons for publications to form a research field.”
• Sendhil Mullainathan writes about how biased algorithms are easier to fix than biased people in the New York Times. “It is much easier to fix a camera that does not register dark skin than to fix a photographer who fails to see dark skinned people.”

Product Management

• Continuous Foresight: Your Business Plan is Science Fiction
  Cool idea: “Why should a business utilize science fiction? What do you think your business plan is? That’s the message of Brian David Johnson, a leading expert on science fiction prototyping and threatcasting. Threatcasting is a sub-genre of forecast that details future threats and how the organization can track threat development and know when to respond. Brian David Johnson joins Continuous Foresight to walk us through why threatcasting is effective and how you can use it in your forecasting work.”

And finally…

professors: wikipedia is not a scholarly source. JSTOR is a scholarly source.

JSTOR: pic.twitter.com/ElmNSUhuof

— kuh•lee’•uh (@MadisonKalia) December 3, 2019