Partially Attended

I’ve just got back from a fantastic workshop looking at infrastructure for research data discovery. I’ll blog about the workshop in due course, but I was asked to comment about Google Dataset Search - Dataset Search. I had the change to meet with Natasha Noi from Google who is behind the service. Natasha Noy – Google AI. As with many google services, it has been created by a small team, but with the underlying web scale infrastructure of Google to build on top of. ... (more)

I sat down with Richard Wynne. Richard has a long career in the publishing space, having been one of the senior team at Aries for a long time. Over the last year Richard has founded Rescognito. Rescognito is a service to allow institutions or individuals to award credits (or rescogs ) to anyone for anything within the scholarly ecosystem. You can reward article contributions, reviews, presentations, knowledge, providing open data. The schema is extendible, so if you have a particular use-case in mind it could be accommodated. ... (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)

A few weeks ago I was at the aannual Rave publishing technology conference. It’s always an interesting event to attend. My main recollection from last year was the interest in blockchain. This year, as I reflect on how I feel about the meeting, I think I have two main things that have stayed with me. The first was the appeal from Tasha to ask us as a community and an industry to do more to think about removing barriers for early career researchers. ... (more)

Heather and Jason from https://ourresearch.org/ have just released a preview of their new tool - unpaywall journals. You can have a look at the preview of this tool now - Unpaywall Journals. They previewed this two weeks ago at FORCE2019 and have clearly gone through a ton of work to get the tool the state it is in todday, so big congraatulations to them on the product release. For those of you not in the know they have a long track record of building useful open infrastructure in the scholarly communications spaace. ... (more)

At Force2019 the other day the one session that I really wanted to see, but missed, was the one by Dr. Elizabeth Gadd on responsible metrics. She has posted her slides here Responsible metrics: what’s the state of the art?. This is a great deck, and I highly encourage reading through it. My takeaways from reading through them are the following: misapplication of metrics is dangerous, leads to stress, has led to some tragic incidents. ... (more)

At Force2019 the other day the one session that I really wanted to see, but missed, was the one by Dr. Elizabeth Gadd on responsible metrics. She has posted her slides here Responsible metrics: what’s the state of the art?. This is a great deck, and I highly encourage reading through it. My takeaways from reading through them are the following: misapplication of metrics is dangerous, leads to stress, has led to some tragic incidents. ... (more)

One of my colleagues sent me over this short report “”3 Things Are Holding Back Your Analytics, and Technology Isn’t One of Them. They think the following elements should be considered: How the analysis teams are structured - they need to report in a way that is understandable (i.e. not be too separate from the business), but at the same time be independent enough to provide unbiassed views. ... (more)

This book review is really only for people who have been reading all of the expanse book series. If you have not then there are some spoilers in here. I finished this over my summer holiday, and it was a ton of fun. I noted that In the first few books of the series when the action was contained within the solar system a lot of book time was taken up describing the time it took to travel around the solar system, and the intricacies if the orbital mechanics that went into that. ... (more)

I’ve just zipped through this book in what feels like about a week, but was probably a bit longer. I didn’t like it. The book sets up engagement with a computer game as a key plot driver, along with specific behaviours of an alien civilisation. Both of these are central to the driver of the book and in both cases I wasn’t able to believe what was happening. They lacked internal consistency and plausibility, in particular the plot device of unpacking a proton and accessing higher dimensional spaces. ... (more)