I just wanted to share some work coming out of the Prakash lab in Stanford. Manu Prakash is a young engineer and research scientist who has taken a very different approach to how to think about the tools we use to do science. He has focussed on building very cheap tools that can be used by anyone in the world. One of the first tools that his lab created was the foldscope - a microscope built from paper, and a small piece of plastic - that can be produced very cheaply and given out to people across the world (https://indiabioscience. ... (more)

CODECHECK is a fascinating service - https://codecheck.org.uk/ That creates a workflow for academics to provide feedback on research code. The project is being led by Stephen Eglen and and Daniel Nüst. They describe what they do succinctly as CODECHECK is a process for independent reproduction of computations and awarding of time-stamped certificates for successful reproductions of scholarly articles. Checking software in research is a significant challenge, and I really like CODECHECK because it is an initiative that has emerged from researchers themselves. ... (more)

The start of December is always a busy time for news in the STM / Product space. There is the annual STM meeting in London, and AWS re-invent also kicks off this week. As a result, within just a few days, I find that I have more things to write about than I can ever possibly have time to get through before the end of the year, we must plough on, and plough on we will. ... (more)

The start of December is always a busy time for news in the STM / Product space. There is the annual STM meeting in London, and AWS re-invent also kicks off this week. As a result, within just a few days, I find that I have more things to write about than I can ever possibly have time to get through before the end of the year, we must plough on, and plough on we will. ... (more)

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. ... (more)

Yesterday I attended a round table discussion hosted by the Belmont Forum about the release of their position on data accessibility statements and digital objects management plans. (It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the reason is that they are aiming to be clear and comprehensive around what they are asking to make it easier for researchers, publishers and other stakeholders to get to compliance around this policy.) You can read their position paper — Draft DAS Statement and Policy for October 2018 Plenary - Google Docs. ... (more)

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. ... (more)

This week I was interviewed for the ALA choice podcast, a podcast that the that is a weekly program featuring in-depth conversations about contemporary trends, best practices, and case studies important to academic librarians. Hosted by Bill Mickey, the Editorial Director at Choice The topic was about trends in big data and the role of the library, and it was really fun to participate in, and the panel I was on included Caroline Muglia from the University of Southern California Libraries as well as Andy Rutkowski and Eimmy Karina Solis from USC libraries. ... (more)

What do we mean when we talk about Big Data? The following blog post about this article provides the following definition of big data: “High volume data that frequently combines highly structured administrative data actively collected by public sector organisations with continuously and automatically collected structured and unstructured real-time data that are often passively created by public and private entities through their internet.” The article is behind a paywall, but the blog is pretty clearly laid out. ... (more)

Covalent Data is a tool to search over research topics. It seems to have the following features: Is a DB of grants, papers, people and institutions. claims to use machine learning to tie these entities together. search results don’t seem to have a way to be exported, so for example though the grant awards results do list the amount of each grant, to get a total amount against a search term, you would need to do the work of extracting each data point manually. ... (more)

I’m on a mission to clear out my instapapper backlocg, so I’m going to be blogging olds rather than news. There was a nice piece in the Atlantic last month talking about how Google could provide a better social experience by activating it’s latent networks, rather than mimicking facebook. But think about Scholar as a latent social network. Each paper contains its own social network that Google already crawls. Every bibliography is filled with other social networks. ... (more)