Partially Attended

Hello SAGE! I joined SAGE at the start of September. Hello SAGE!! Here I outline some of my initial impressions. First up, I’ve been really delighted to meet so many great people at SAGE. I’ve received great support from everyone in the company. I generally find publishing folk to be very friendly. This is a friendly industry, working on the fabric of knowledge, knowing that your work can help to make a difference, trying to make the work of academics a bit easier. ... (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)

Cameron Neylon, Damian Pattinson, Geoffrey Bilder, and Jennifer Lin have just posted a cracker of a preprint onto biorxiv. On the origin of nonequivalent states: how we can talk about preprints Increasingly, preprints are at the center of conversations across the research ecosystem. But disagreements remain about the role they play. Do they “count” for research assessment? Is it ok to post preprints in more than one place? In this paper, we argue that these discussions often conflate two separate issues, the history of the manuscript and the status granted it by different communities. ... (more)

How do people represent themselves on social media, and how are they represented by others? Which qualities and virtues are emphasized (or ignored)? How polarised are these (re)presentations? There is a workshop looking at this very question happening in Oxford in early January. The morning will be a series of workshops on tools for tackling a question like the above (I’m thinking of attending the Wikipedia and Topic Modelling workshop), and the afternoon will be a hackathon looking at some data sets. ... (more)

A quick spin with Textometrica Yesterday I had a good conversation with Simon Lindgren, the creator of textometrica. I decided to try out the tool before chatting to him. Textometrica encapsulates a process for understanding the relationship and distribution of the occurrence of concepts in a body of plain text. It provides a multi-step online tool for the analysis. The advantage of using this tool is that you don’t need to be able to do any coding to get to a point where you have some quite interesting analysis of your corpus. ... (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)

This is a short story about software, some of the things I hate about it, my lack of knowledge of ruby, and a desire to own my own words. For various reasons I’m working on a brand new machine, I decided that I want to start posting to my own blog again (as well as cross posting to Medium, because fuck it, why not). That involved dusting down my Jekyll site and seeing if I could get it to work again. ... (more)

Well, here we are, two days out from the referendum. I’m voting IN, but that’s not the main point of this post. The fact that we are having this referendum at all, the fact that it is going to be so close, the fact that it has unleashed a wave of ill informed anger across the divide, all of these things have made me worry and despair a little about the state of politics in Britain. ... (more)

# Goodbye eLife! So after nearly four and a half years I am moving on from eLife. I’ve had an amazing time, worked with some amazing people, and we have gotten a few really nice things done. First off, we are hiring a replacement for my role, this is an amazing opportunity to effect real change in scholarly publishing. eLife has just announced follow on funding of £25M to sustain us through to 2022. ... (more)

eLife’s peer review process is really good. One of the key attributes of this is that reviewers are not blind to one another, and they have to consult with one another. This largely removes the third reviewer problem. We also publish the decision letters and the author responses to the decision letter. Reviewers have the option of revealing themselves to authors. As with most review systms our reviewers know who the authors are. ... (more)