“The rise of preprints and the move towards universal open access are potential threats to traditional business models in scholarly publishing, writes Phil Gooch
Publishers have started responding to the latter with transformative agreements[1], but if authors can simply upload their research to a preprint server for immediate dissemination, comment and review, why submit to a traditional journal at all? Some journals are addressing this by offering authors frictionless submission direct from the preprint server. This tackles two problems at once: easing authors’ frustrations with existing journal submission systems[2], and providing a more direct route from the raw preprint to the richly linked, multiformat version of record that readers demand and accessibility standards require….
Dissemination of early-stage research as mobile-unfriendly PDF is arguably a technological step backwards. If preprints are here to stay, the reading experience needs to be improved. A number of vendors have developed native XML or LaTeX authoring environments which enable dissemination in richer formats….”
“Ahmed Eldawy, an assistant professor of computer science in the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, and his group spent the last three years combing the internet for public spatio-temporal datasets, studying their attributes, and summarizing the results for each set on interactive maps that show the user exactly what they’re getting.
“People who work on data science need datasets but can spend a lot of time finding them,” Eldawy said. “I wanted to build an archive they can find easily.”
Called the UCR Spatio-temporal Active Repository, or UCR STAR, the archive is made available as a service to the research community to provide easy access to large spatio-temporal datasets through an interactive exploratory interface. Users can search and filter those datasets as if shopping for their research, except that everything is free….”
“Summarizes research papers, creates interactive flashcards, highlights key points, links to open-access versions of each citation.
Scholarcy™ is the solution to that pile of papers on your virtual desk – research made easy!
This Extension gives you the key points of any research paper, report, or book chapter. It creates a referenced, paraphrased summary, and generates a background reading list for those new to a field.
Our unique Robo-Highlighter™ automatically highlights important contributions made by the paper. No more highlighting with a marker pen – our advanced AI does it for you.
Scholarcy also extracts figures, tables, and bibliographies, and locates open-access PDFs for each reference from Google Scholar, arXiv and elsewhere….”
“In my discipline (e-health literacy), I often find myself debating whether abstracts being freely available to patients is of any real benefit. For researchers and clinicians, abstracts are a great timesaver—enabling a “flick-through” of the copious amounts of new articles for timely follow up. They may also be used by treating physicians and healthcare teams as a starting point for treatment planning and research. But abstracts are not designed to be an independent pathway to inform health decisions for patients lacking the appropriate professional expertise and health literacy skills….”
[Is this an argument against OA for abstracts, or for OA to full-text articles?]
“1) Academic Research and knowledge from and about Africa should be freely available to all who wish to access, use or reuse it while at the same time being protected from misuse and misappropriation.
2) African scientists and scientists working on African topics and/or territory will make their research achievements including underlying datasets available in a digital Open Access repository or journal and an explicit Open Access license is applied.
3) African research output should be made available in the principle common language of the global science community as well as in one or more local African languages – at least in summary.
4) It is important to take into consideration in the discussions indigenous and traditional knowledge in its various forms.
5) It is necessary to respect the diverse dynamics of knowledge generation and circulation by discipline and geographical area.
6) It is necessary to recognise, respect and acknowledge the regional diversity of African scientific journals, institutional repositories and academic systems.
7) African Open Access policies and initiatives promote Open Scholarship, Open Source and Open Standards for interoperability purposes.
8) Multi-stakeholder mechanisms for collaboration and cooperation should be established to ensure equal participation across the African continent.
9) Economic investment in Open Access is consistent with its benefit to societies on the African continent – therefore institutions and governments in Africa provide the enabling environment, infrastructure and capacity building required to support Open Access
10) African Open Access stakeholders and actors keep up close dialogues with representatives from all world regions, namely Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania….”
“1) Academic Research and knowledge from and about Africa should be freely available to all who wish to access, use or reuse it while at the same time being protected from misuse and misappropriation.
2) African scientists and scientists working on African topics and/or territory will make their research achievements including underlying datasets available in a digital Open Access repository or journal and an explicit Open Access license is applied.
3) African research output should be made available in the principle common language of the global science community as well as in one or more local African languages – at least in summary.
4) It is important to take into consideration in the discussions indigenous and traditional knowledge in its various forms.
5) It is necessary to respect the diverse dynamics of knowledge generation and circulation by discipline and geographical area.
6) It is necessary to recognise, respect and acknowledge the regional diversity of African scientific journals, institutional repositories and academic systems.
7) African Open Access policies and initiatives promote Open Scholarship, Open Source and Open Standards for interoperability purposes.
8) Multi-stakeholder mechanisms for collaboration and cooperation should be established to ensure equal participation across the African continent.
9) Economic investment in Open Access is consistent with its benefit to societies on the African continent – therefore institutions and governments in Africa provide the enabling environment, infrastructure and capacity building required to support Open Access
10) African Open Access stakeholders and actors keep up close dialogues with representatives from all world regions, namely Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania….”
“One of the Allen Institute’s priorities is an academically oriented search engine, established in 2015, called Semantic Scholar (slogan: “Cut through the clutter”). The need is great, with more than 34,000 peer-reviewed journals publishing 2.5 million articles a year. “What if a cure for an intractable cancer is hidden within the tedious reports on thousands of clinical studies?,” Etzioni once said.
Although Semantic Scholar has focused so far on computer and biomedical sciences, Etzioni says that the engine will soon push into the social sciences and the humanities as well. The Chronicle spoke with him about information overload, impact factors’ imperfect inevitability, and the promise and perils of AI….”
“Paper Digest uses an AI to generate an automatic summary of a given research paper. You can simply provide a DOI (digital object identifier), or the url to a PDF file, then Paper Digest will return a bulleted summary of the paper. This works only for open access full-text articles that allow derivative generation (i.e. CC-BY equivalent). In case you receive an error message and no summary is generated, it is most likely either the full text is not available to use or the license does not allow derivative generation….”