Distill is an experiment in bringing interactive documents and scholarly documents together. I’m often asked what the future of publishing might look like, and were we to embrace what the web offers it might look like distill.
Two things though, make it look like a nice product. Right now paper flow into this journal is very low, and secondly they have advertised a large prize to attract work in this format.
This is a great post on using the jobs to be done framework. There are two specific enhancements that are discussed - how to weight those jobs, and how to use granularity of the jobs to aid the design process (less granularity gives more freedom in the design phase).
The authors wanted to use surveys to get a sense of importance of the under served needs, but in the end had to resort to a simple variant of card sorting.
In my last post I gave an overview of what blockchain is (while also confusing House of Pain and Cypress Hill. (These posts are probably best read whilst listening to either of those songs).
In this post I’m going to look at potential use cases for blockchain in STEM and scholarly publishing.
Scholarly communications use cases. When thinking about any use cases in STEM I think the questions we need to answer are:
This is a really interesting initiative from the university of California. If the scholarly landscape looked like this then publishers would have to generate revenue entirely from services and derivative open products, rather than from content licensing.
Most of the points is the manifesto are fairly unsurprising but two points stood out as interesting to me.
Point 10 asks for all metadata to be made available including usage metadata. Are Counter reports sufficient for this, or is anything else needed?
Great post looking into stats on preprints in crossref. Headline takeaways, preprint registration into crossref is 10x that of article growth, but it’s hard to read a lot into that as the absolute numbers are so different at the moment 2.4M per month (published articles) vs 10k per month (preprints). There is also some interesting data on preprint citations, preprint citations come in at best at a level of about 10% of the citations to the subsequently published article.
Scholia is an amazing interface into scholarly information held inside id WikiData. It includes information about authors, articles and a very large chunk of the citation graph. You can see an article pate here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/work/Q24595162. The tool extracts topic information on articles, shows cites and citing articles (and how many citations each of these articles has)
A lot of people are taking about “blockchain for science” and “blockchain for publishing”, but I’m skeptical. Some of the people taking about this are really smart, so I could be wrong.
If we think of scholarly publishing as being like the connective tissue of science, and we accept that this idea is gaining purchase within our community that we have to realise that we are looking at a case of
Thoughtworks have created a tool to allow you to build your own “Digital Radar”. The one linked to here was put together a few years ago by people at the BMJ to look at the technology landscape in STM publishing (There are some really interesting things in there in some interesting locations).
<a href=https://radar.
I’ve been working with lean value tree as a framework for some time now, but there are few online resources about this. The linked presentation does a great job of giving an overview of the tool. In particular I like how they call out the need to describe the promise of value to the customer, something that we could definitely do more of.
Another presentation on the same topic is this one: https://www.
Back in November of last year we ran the first scholarly comms meetup with a focus on product management. There are lots of great meetups out there for people who work in scholarly comms, but we felt that there might be an unscratched need to have a meeting where the focus was not explicitly on community building, or on new technologies, or on public outreach, or on new trends and technologies, but solely on the product management work that is required to develop these kinds of tools.
