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Marcie Granahan,
NFAIS Executive Director
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Scholarly publishing is faced with a dizzying pace of technological change that’s disrupting current business models and age-old practices. One of the biggest drivers is artificial intelligence (AI), and in the not too distant future, smart machines will replace or render obsolete many of the tasks currently being done by humans [see full article here].
Take for example Microsoft’s recent release of Seeing AI, a free mobile app for the visually impaired that allows users to point their cameras and hear descriptions of people, objects, and even text [see full article here]. Using machine reading—a combination of deep learning and natural language processing—Seeing AI is able to read and make sense of images and text. For the scholarly communications community, one of the greatest potential benefits of machine reading is the ability to quickly find information buried within journals and books.
Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark recently answered the long-standing debate of whether sifting through full-text research papers—rather than much shorter and simpler abstracts—is worth the effort [see full article here]. The answer? Text mining full research articles gave consistently better results than text mining abstracts.
Academic, scholarly, and commercial publishers alike are taking advantage of machine-reading technology to publish their journals in full-text HTML in addition to the traditional PDF. But what might this mean for future applications of, or possibly the need for, abstracts? Clearly full-text mining is an important industry shift, and publishers will need to work together to develop standards for machine-readable articles.
But with the speed of technology moving so quickly, how much of a R&D investment should scholarly publishers make? It requires a delicate balance of performance-driven operations and investment in innovation [see full article here]. Rely too heavily on yesterday’s delivery platforms to drive revenue and profitability will eventually suffer. It takes a brave business to double down on sustained innovation initiatives when their market share is under threat and the fruits of their innovation efforts are unlikely to pay this year’s bills. But if you don’t evolve to new ways of doing things, you reduce the value of your assets amongst the competition.
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Past insights and reflections on industry developments written by NFAIS Executive Director Marcie Granahan are now archived in NFAIS Community Forum. Feel free to post your comments about these and other key topics there. |
Formtek
Robotics and new Artificial Intelligence technologies like Deep Learning may mean that jobs with many repetitive tasks that are currently being done by humans will be replaceable by machines in the not too distant future. Stephen Prentice, vice-president and Gartner analyst, said that “the economics of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will lead to many tasks performed by professionals today becoming low-cost utilities.
READ MORE
eWeek
Microsoft's efforts to democratize artificial intelligence (AI) continued this week with the release of Seeing AI, a free mobile app for the blind or visually impaired that uses audio to describes the world around its users. Available now for Apple iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), the app enables users to point their cameras and hear descriptions of the people, objects and text that appear before them.
READ MORE
Science Magazine
With more than a million scientific papers produced each year, keeping on top of the latest research is becoming an impossible task. That’s why a growing number of scientists are having computers trawl through thousands of research papers at once for raw data and text. Now, in one of the largest text and data mining exercises ever conducted, scientists say they have identified the best way to do such searches, which could improve the hunt for everything from new drug targets to genes that have not been studied in detail.
READ MORE
The Bookseller
'Moore’s Law’ was established by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, back in 1965. It states that computing power will double every year. 52 years on, Moore has been more or less right in his prediction - and his law has become shorthand for the sustained, dizzying pace of technological change.
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NY Magazine
Imagine a convenient service that uses information harvested about every facet of your life to show you pertinent, up-to-date information. Presented in an endlessly scrolling list of images, text, and hyperlinks, the feed service aggregates and synthesizes your stated interests, constantly learning from your behavior to ensure it’s presenting you with the most engaging information.
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CNet
Want to give your PC an IQ boost? Intel's $80 Movidius Neural Compute Stick lets you plug some computing brains into your laptop's USB port.
The device, geared for tinkerers and programmers, can crank out 100 billion mathematical calculations per second while consuming a paltry 1 watt of power. That's the kind of thing that can be handy if you're trying to work out computer vision in your drone or help your cleaning robot tell the difference between a cat and a coffee table.
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Techdirt
The weird and persistently silly copyright reform process in the EU Parliament continues to get more and more bizarre and stupid. Last month, we told you about the first committee vote, which we feared would be terrible, but turned out to be only marginally stupid, as the worst parts of the proposal were rejected. Now, two more committees — the Culture and Education (CULT) and Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committees — have voted on their own reform proposals and the results are really, really bad if you support things like culture, education, research and the public.
READ MORE
Information Today, Inc.
The scholarly publishing industry has stepped up its attack on copyright-infringing piracy websites in a series of lawsuits filed in the federal courts. Recently, Elsevier won a $15 million default judgment against Sci-Hub, an online self-admitted “pirate website” providing access to a claimed 62 million articles, and The Library Genesis Project (LibGen), a similar site claiming access to 52 million scholarly and nonscholarly articles. Elsevier’s success was followed in short order by a lawsuit filed by the American Chemical Society (ACS) and a separate lawsuit filed by four leading academic book publishers against ABCDeBook for infringing on their electronic textbooks.
READ MORE
Inside Higher Ed
Science is an inherently social enterprise. Progress only occurs when new results are communicated to and accepted by the relevant scientific communities. The major lines of communication run through professional journals and the double-blind peer review process. Academic journals are also a main currency of scholarly success, as publication in a top journal can be a make-or-break career moment for a researcher.
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Phys.org
Academic journals are increasingly asking authors to use transparent reporting practices to "trust, but verify" that outcomes are not being reported in a biased way and to enable other researchers to reproduce the results. To implement these reporting practices, most journals rely on the process of peer review — in which other scholars review research findings before publication
— but relatively few journals measure the quality and effectiveness of the process.
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Indiana University Libraries
The IU Office of Scholarly Publishing is working on a lot of exciting projects this summer. One of those projects is planning its rollout of Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3. The Public Knowledge Project announced the release of OJS 3 last summer and they have been continually updating and improving the open source journals publishing software since the upgrade.
READ MORE
Times Higher Education
Chinese scientists can win awards of up to $165,000 (£127,000) from their universities for publishing in leading scientific journals, according to research that exposes the country’s system of “cash for articles”.
Academics in the West have long feared that competition to be published in the most prestigious, high-profile journals in order to achieve a career boost may be distorting scientific incentives.
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Research Information
A little over three years ago, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library set out to explore what the ‘Academic Book of the Future’ might look like, in the context of open access publishing and the digital revolution. A project team including researchers from King’s College London and University College London collaborated with academics, libraries, publishers and book-sellers to understand perspectives and pinpoint key developments.
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The Scholarly Kitchen
The category of learned publications we have come to know as “reference works” is ripe for innovation, perhaps even overripe. A recent study from Oxford University Press (OUP) further documents the decline of reference products as a distinct content type, and illuminates fertile ground for an inventive approach to modern, contextual resources that serve today’s scholarly information needs.
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JISC
The landscape of academic publishing has seen a discernible increase in new publishing initiatives entering the sector over the last few years. These new publishing initiatives have a potentially disruptive effect on the scholarly communication environment, providing new avenues for the dissemination of research outputs and acting as pathfinders for the evolution of academic publishing and the scholarly record.
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The Merkle
Digital publishers must always look for new ways to embrace disruptive technologies. Any digital publisher should be looking into utilizing blockchain technology, but that is much easier said than done in most cases. To that end, Po.et aims to provide a convenient service to all. The startup utilizes blockchain technology and timestamped metadata to create new licensing opportunities. It is an ingenious system which will change the world of digital publishing.
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Publishers Daily
Publishing platform Verst, which launched in February, has introduced new features in an update unveiled this week, which includes a homepage builder and paywall support. CEO AJ Frank told TechCrunch his goal was to create a blogging platform with optimization and analytics already built in.
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eLifeSciences
In the days immediately following the launch of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), some major names in scholarly publishing made the decision to release their reference data into the public domain. Three months on, a further 16 publishers have added their names to the list and the percentage of articles with open reference data has moved from 40 percent to over 45 percent. That’s more than 16 million articles with open references.
READ MORE
The Bookseller
Research communications platform Kudos is to run a pilot programme aimed at helping find ways to tackle the issue of copyright infringement on scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) while still embracing academics' wish to increase the visibility of their work.
The problem of researchers posting the full texts of their work on SCNs such as ResearchGate and Academic.edu when they do not have the copyright permission to do so is an ongoing issue for the academic publishing industry.
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Forbes
Not a week goes by that my inbox isn’t filled with a small barrage of announcements from publishers, universities, funding agencies and NGOs unveiling the latest open access or open data initiative. It is fantastic to see this newfound enthusiasm for making the final output of the world’s research available for open reading, reuse and replication, but the focus to date has nearly exclusively been on the final outcomes of research, while the initial ethical reviews of just what research should be conducted in the first place remains cloaked in secrecy.
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NFAIS
Can R&D Funding Be Separated From Political Agendas?
Monday, July 31, 2017 10 a.m.
Call for Presentations: NFAIS 2017-2018 Lunch & Learn Series
Monday, Aug. 7, 2017 5 p.m.
Open Access and Beyond Conference
Monday, Oct 2, 2017 1 p.m. - Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017 3 p.m.
2018 Annual Conference
Wednesday, Feb 28, 2018 1 p.m. - Friday, Mar. 2, 2018 2 p.m.
| Department Head for Technical Services |
Florida Atlantic University
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Boca Raton, FL |
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Associate University Librarian for Scholary Resources
| Library of the University of California, Davis
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Davis, CA |
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Director of Marketing, Publishing
| The Optical Society
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Washington, DC |
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Digital Humanities Developer
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University of Virginia
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Charlottesville,VA |
| Editor in Chief
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Elsevier
| Anywhere, VI, United States |
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Editor in Chief, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics
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American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
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Anywhere |
| Metadata and Digital Initiatives Librarian
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Emporia State University
| Emporia, KS United States |
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Systems Architect
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EBSCO Information Services
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Ipswich, MA, United States |
| Audience Engagement Editor
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Annual Reviews
| Palo, Alto, CA, United States |
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