Partially Attended

There is tension in this question that gets to the heart of where a publisher should be putting its resources, and perhaps more importantly what the reasons are behind those investment decisions. The side of the argument that says they are not technology companies might say that at the heart of what publishers do is content, and so they are content and service companies. Invest then in acquisition, in reach, in marketing, in branding, in distribution and in making the sales process as cost effective asa possible. ... (more)

At my current company we are looking at strategies for improving the resilience of our core systems, and looking at the issue of disaster recovery from a broad perspective. This comes under the heading business continuity management. From a product development perspective these considerations are also important. For successful products / product organisations consider these two perspectives: Most new business value that we create from innovation projects comes from improvements or iterations to existing products over the creation of totally new products (from an evolutionary perspective this makes sense, products or services that are already making revenue have proved they they have an environmental fitness function that works, whereas new products are like genetic modifications, the vast majority of which lead towards extinct endpoints. ... (more)

At the moment one thing that is front and centre in my thinking about AI and machine learning in publishing and the scholarly ecosystem is how to make the case for ROI for investment in the technology, and more specifically investing in making data actionable. Overall I think there is great promise for challenges like knowledge discovery and machine generated hypotheses, but there is massive potential for these technologies to also just make the quality of our work better, and to increase the value of our work by reducing and removing toil in the workplace. ... (more)

This is a test post while trying to fix some domain issues with the blog. ... (more)

Three links today looking at the state of agile as a software development practice. Flavours of Agile In Flavours of Agile Pat Kua briefly describes and rates a number of agile processes. There are a ton here, and loads that I’d not heard of. One of the key messages that I get from reading this is that “AGILE” as a fixed practice has been growing, especially within in enterprise, and perhaps not to the benefit of actually delivering or simplifying the delivery of complex processes. ... (more)

So Pat Kua recently tweeted: UML failed so here we have AML (Arbitrary Modeling Language) https://t.co/BnbgC8ZHTD — Pat Kua (@patkua) November 9, 2018 and this got me thinking about the worries I’ve had about not doing “diagramming” right, but the above tweet led me to read a ton of really interesting posts on software architecting. Bottom line is, as with so many things, pick the artefact that fits the purpose and the audience. ... (more)

The results below are oldish, but interesting around the rate of retractions in the scholarly literature, and there is currently a bit of a debate going on around retractions (e.g. What a massive database of retracted papers reveals about science publishing’s ‘death penalty’ | Science | AAAS Steen RG, Casadevall A, Fang FC (2013) Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased? PLoS ONE 8(7): e68397. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0068397 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0068397 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0068397.g001 The increase in retracted articles appears to reflect changes in the behaviour of both authors and institutions. ... (more)

I took some notes on some of the sessions at the conference yesterday. Dave Smith - object oriented publishing. Dave makes a good case here about how we should think about the future of scholarly publishing — in terms of objects that can be reformed based on the needs and competencies of the readers. He points out that while we do have in place good ontologies and domain models, our entire view of publishing and our publishing infrastructures, remain laggy and are a barrier to moving in this direction. ... (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)

I’ve started working my way through The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures - a hand book of techniques for collaborative work. So far I’ve tried one technique from the book - one two four all. The idea is super simple and is an alternative to open brainstorming or post-it note sessions. Before describing the technique with a few comments, I’ll just point out one of the weaknesses of a group work activity like a retrospective. ... (more)