ScholCommsProd

I sat down with Richard Wynne. Richard has a long career in the publishing space, having been one of the senior team at Aries for a long time. Over the last year Richard has founded Rescognito. Rescognito is a service to allow institutions or individuals to award credits (or rescogs ) to anyone for anything within the scholarly ecosystem. You can reward article contributions, reviews, presentations, knowledge, providing open data. The schema is extendible, so if you have a particular use-case in mind it could be accommodated.

I’ve finally gotten around to looking at the report that Kudos developed earlier this year looking into where research outputs go to, and where they get consumed, after they have been published. You get grab a copy of the report here How to build a global, engaged audience for your research.. The report is based on a survey of 10k researchers, supported with interviews and desk research. It’s a short read (19 pages), so go ahead and grab the report and have a look.

A few weeks ago I was at the aannual Rave publishing technology conference. It’s always an interesting event to attend. My main recollection from last year was the interest in blockchain. This year, as I reflect on how I feel about the meeting, I think I have two main things that have stayed with me. The first was the appeal from Tasha to ask us as a community and an industry to do more to think about removing barriers for early career researchers.

Heather and Jason from https://ourresearch.org/ have just released a preview of their new tool - unpaywall journals. You can have a look at the preview of this tool now - Unpaywall Journals. They previewed this two weeks ago at FORCE2019 and have clearly gone through a ton of work to get the tool the state it is in todday, so big congraatulations to them on the product release. For those of you not in the know they have a long track record of building useful open infrastructure in the scholarly communications spaace.

At Force2019 the other day the one session that I really wanted to see, but missed, was the one by Dr. Elizabeth Gadd on responsible metrics. She has posted her slides here Responsible metrics: what’s the state of the art?. This is a great deck, and I highly encourage reading through it. My takeaways from reading through them are the following: misapplication of metrics is dangerous, leads to stress, has led to some tragic incidents.

At Force2019 the other day the one session that I really wanted to see, but missed, was the one by Dr. Elizabeth Gadd on responsible metrics. She has posted her slides here Responsible metrics: what’s the state of the art?. This is a great deck, and I highly encourage reading through it. My takeaways from reading through them are the following: misapplication of metrics is dangerous, leads to stress, has led to some tragic incidents.

One of my colleagues sent me over this short report “”3 Things Are Holding Back Your Analytics, and Technology Isn’t One of Them. They think the following elements should be considered: How the analysis teams are structured - they need to report in a way that is understandable (i.e. not be too separate from the business), but at the same time be independent enough to provide unbiassed views.

There is tension in this question that gets to the heart of where a publisher should be putting its resources, and perhaps more importantly what the reasons are behind those investment decisions. The side of the argument that says they are not technology companies might say that at the heart of what publishers do is content, and so they are content and service companies. Invest then in acquisition, in reach, in marketing, in branding, in distribution and in making the sales process as cost effective asa possible.

At my current company we are looking at strategies for improving the resilience of our core systems, and looking at the issue of disaster recovery from a broad perspective. This comes under the heading business continuity management. From a product development perspective these considerations are also important. For successful products / product organisations consider these two perspectives: Most new business value that we create from innovation projects comes from improvements or iterations to existing products over the creation of totally new products (from an evolutionary perspective this makes sense, products or services that are already making revenue have proved they they have an environmental fitness function that works, whereas new products are like genetic modifications, the vast majority of which lead towards extinct endpoints.

At the moment one thing that is front and centre in my thinking about AI and machine learning in publishing and the scholarly ecosystem is how to make the case for ROI for investment in the technology, and more specifically investing in making data actionable. Overall I think there is great promise for challenges like knowledge discovery and machine generated hypotheses, but there is massive potential for these technologies to also just make the quality of our work better, and to increase the value of our work by reducing and removing toil in the workplace.