Welcome back for the next installment of FuturePub. There are tons of people at the meeting tonight, pizza and beers care of WriteLaTeX!!

# Sumika Sakanishi - Product Manager - ODI

They aim to encourage organisations to unlock data. They also work with individuals to help them unlock the value of open data.

Open data is free to use, reuse and redistribute it, e.g. CC-BY.

The open data instutute have created the open data certificate, an online tool to help open data owners publish their data. It’s a questionairre. At the end you get a certifciation telling you how open your data is.

You get a badge that you can put on your website. I remain bearish on the topic of badges on websites.

They have issued about 1k certificates in either draft of publised form. About 100 are fully published.

Tool is available here: certificates.theoid.org.

For more thoughts on openening data within research see my recent posts here, here and a summary here.

 Walacea - back sciecne you believe in

walacea.com

This is a crowd funding site for researchers.

Name inspired by alfred russell wallace, who crowd-funded his work in early 19th century terms.

They launced today with their first two proejcts.

Walacea receives a 5% comission on all projects.

It’s interesting that they put their comission up front.

They are hoping to be able to raise on the order of about 50k per project, or thereabouts. The inital two projects are aiming for about 15k. On the question of the addressable market, in the UK 9B is given by the public to charity every year, so that’s an indication of one way to measure possible addressable market. They contrast to experiment.com by providing a rewards program to donors.

(lot’s of interest in this talk, lots of questions).

Anna Sharman - cofactor, and the journal selector tools.

Other tools that exist - Journal/Author Name Estimator
Edanz Journal Selector - []

Cofactor is a complimentary tool that might be useful. It’s about broad scope journals, there are many options and it’s manually curated.

Includes queries aroud options such as

• type of peer review
• licence
• gold v hybrid
• APC
• non profit vs profit
• length limits
• copyediting or not

The current focus is on broad scope open access journals.

Looks nice!

How are they going to tackle issues around scalability? Currently they are checking the data against the journal website. The issue of scalablilty needs to considered carefully.

The aim of the tool is to use it to bring people to the website in the hope that

BookGenie 451 - Andrew Mcfarland

Their mission is to improve research outcomes in higher education. They match a profile of the researcher against content coming from a publisher’s repository. They have very clever tools that do this.

They produce snips of content based on keyword search.

Their co-founder was a CTO at Amazon and was one of the people based on working on the Kindle.

They aim to sell micro-pieces of content for micro-prices, they take a 40% cut on sales of content to consumers. They have 4 publishers setup for a proof of concept.

There is a “textbook cirses”, too many unafordable textbooks in the higher education market.

The impact of Open Access is going to adversly affect publisher incomes (yay!! – my comment).

Search engines for academic content are poor, institutinoal based repository specific search indexes preofrm better than MS academic search or google scholar. The big question is how do you move the user behaviour. If you can get the user to search in an app, or in their book, that might be an option.

They are expecting BookGenie 451 to become the iTunes for academic search.

(There are soooooo many questions about this product, but I don’t have to ask any questions at this stage, becuase they are at such an early stage the the reality of creating a real product will iron out many of these questions, so I’ll come back and ask my questions in 18 months, if they are still around).

# Alan Hyndman - the latest from planet figshare

• they have a figshare for publishers - suite of products
• figshare portal is a library of supp data for a publiser
• figshare datastore can handly up to 200GB file types
• figshare innovations - any cool data realted prodcuts - related content engine on plos is driven by this tool, will do relatedness at the individual file level (sounds a little like the source data proejct that EMBO is working on).
• HGV database - human genome variation database

# Mattias Priparri - new developments from papers, the citation tool of the future?

• their citation tool is a stand alone tool, it can insert citations into almost any app on your mac.
• it’s inspired by applications like Alfred and other quick launcer applications
• they want their citation tool to be like a quick launcher for scientific content

# Wrapup

It’s a wrap, time for the pub!! The next futurepub event will be in January in Oxford, I’m going to try to make it.