Spotlight on: Cassyni Journal Seminar Series

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2023. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

Cassyni is a startup launched in 2021 by the founders of Publons, Mendeley and Kopernio (now EndNote Click), we are based in London and have team members in the US and Europe. The platform was originally developed in the midst of the Covid pandemic as a way for researchers to organise, run, publish and preserve research seminars online.

Cassyni’s publisher offering is seeing rapid uptake across all fields of research and has been adopted by both commercial publishers (e.g. Elsevier, Springer Nature and Cambridge University Press) as well as society publishers (e.g. Royal Society, New Phytologist and AIAA). 

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards? 

Cassyni Journal Seminar Series is a platform for publishers to run, organise and publish online seminars in which authors talk about their latest research. It includes a suite of intuitive workflow tools making it easy for editors to convene keynote live events and author-led seminars.  

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

The Cassyni team is made up of former researchers who have extensive experience of bringing innovative products to the publisher market that have positively changed scholarly communication. The team passionately believe that research seminars are an important part of the academic lifecycle and are currently an unseen jewel. By growing a connected ecosystem around seminars it will enable a well established medium for communicating research to travel further, faster to a more inclusive global audience. 

There are 2 types of seminars in the Cassyni Journal Seminar Series, Keynote seminars and Author-led seminars. 

Keynote seminars are live online events presented by authors hand-picked by the journal editors for their outstanding research. The seminars are promoted to the journal’s audience, who can attend the event and subscribe to the series, enabling the publisher to build a community around a topic, discipline or journal. Cassyni Keynote Seminars capture the magic of an in-person seminar, with the added bonus of being able to include a more diverse and geographically dispersed audience. The ‘watch later’ functionality allows researchers in different timezones or those unable to attend live to view the recording and take part in the Q&A asynchronously. All seminar recordings are preserved in a custom branded journal seminar series page on Cassyni. 

 
Author-led Seminars are designed to be scalable and require minimal input from journal teams. Selected authors are invited to give a Cassyni seminar as part of the manuscript acceptance process through a light-touch integration with editorial management systems. Authors simply click on the Cassyni link which walks them through the self-serve seminar publishing workflow. Online seminars based on a researcher’s latest publications are a proven route to increased reach and accelerated impact, helping them disseminate their findings to new audiences and boosting research integrity. 

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

Research seminar series form the centres of communities in which academics across disciplines share and discuss the latest research. However, without dedicated workflow tools and supporting infrastructure journal publishers have not been able to engage researchers participating in these communities in a systematic and scalable way. Increasingly, researchers are seeking out online events and videos as compelling complements to published articles when consuming research. For many researchers a 30 minute seminar can be a more engaging entry point to a new topic than a 30 page manuscript. 

Seminar recordings are automatically enhanced using Cassyni’s proprietary AI technology to produce high quality transcripts, extract slides and detect and resolve references to other scholarly works contained in the talk. The enhanced recording which includes automatic hyperlinks to journal content embedded in the video and is then published with a DOI ensuring it is part of the scholarly record. Seminars that are associated with a research article are linked from Cassyni, driving engagement and traffic to the publisher website. 

 
Publishers and societies are always looking for new ways to push the boundaries of research and engage their authors and readers with value-add services. By allowing authors to give seminars associated with their publications there is a chance for the community to hear directly from the people behind the papers. With the rise of generative AI and papermills having a seminar published alongside a paper is a valuable tool to boost research integrity and increase trust in the research. 

What are your plans for the future? 

A major focus for Cassyni is connecting online seminars deeply into the wider scholarly ecosystem as first class research outputs.  Cassyni seminars are already issued with a Crossref DOI and so are discoverable wherever Crossref is indexed. There are imminent plans to integrate with a multitude of research tools and discovery platforms so watch this space!

About the author

Ben Kaube co-founded Cassyni to help researchers disseminate their work through seminars and video. Prior to Cassyni he founded one-click research access tool Kopernio (now EndNote Click, acquired by Clarivate) and Newsflo (acquired by Elsevier). Ben holds a PhD in physics from Imperial College London and was named a Forbes “30 Under 30” for Science and Healthcare in 2020.

More information

Cassyni: https://cassyni.com/

Spotlight on: Bilingualism from submission to publication from Medwave and Kriyadocs

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2023. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

Medwave is a bilingual, open-access, MEDLINE-included medical journal founded by Dr. Vivienne C. Bachelet in 2001. Its mission is to elevate clinical professional standards in the region by facilitating access, overcoming geographical and economic barriers, and improving the quality of scientific reporting and research.

Kriyadocs is an ecosystem for scholarly publishers that offers technology-led solutions and services to streamline publishing workflows from submission to distribution for global academic, professional, and scholarly publishers.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

As a design partner, Medwave collaborated with Kriyadocs to establish a fully bilingual peer review and production platform capable of handling submissions in both Spanish and English. The platform includes comprehensive Spanish copyediting and English translation stages to ensure consistency throughout the publication process.

This submission is based on the Learned Publishing article titled "A technology-based, financially sustainable, quality improvement intervention in a medical journal for bilingualism from submission to publication" by Dr. Vivienne C. Bachelet and Dr. Máximo Rousseau Portalis (Bachelet & Rousseau-Portalis, 2023*).

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

Kriyadocs' online submission system manages peer review in the journal's source language and seamlessly transitions to the copyediting, typesetting, and proof-checking module. A modification was programmed by the Kriyadocs team to handle production processes for both the source language and its translated version.

Salient features of the workflow that enable and enhance the fully bilingual journal publication include:

• An online submission system that is capable of handling peer review in the journal’s source language.
• A smooth transition from the peer review process to production—including copyediting, typesetting, and proof checking, with an XML-first approach.
• The use of AI-based tools, such as DeepL for language translation and Grammarly for content editing, by Medwave editors to produce error-free translations with speed, efficiency, and lower costs.
• Fully automated PDF and JATS XML files for publication, as well as deposits to third-party preservation and archiving platforms.
• Automated recycling of non-translatable sections reduces inconsistencies between original and translated versions of articles.
• Simultaneous publication of both Spanish and English versions of the journal.

The ACTIVE platform, available as an open source software, generates the fully bilingual website for the journal. The website has been set up such that it transitions seamlessly between the Spanish and English interfaces.

After the implementation of this intervention, the journal was able to offer full bilingualism for manuscripts submitted in Spanish and ensure the simultaneous publication of Spanish and English articles with no delays between versions.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

A bilingual journal enables the dissemination of research to a larger audience while preserving the local language and locally-generated knowledge, as Dr. Bachelet presented at the Ninth International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. However, this can be a cost- and resource-intensive endeavor.

Dr. Vivienne C. Bachelet and Ravi Venkataramani at 9th Peer Review Congress

This collaboration is significant and innovative because it established a fully bilingual peer review and production platform capable of handling submissions in both Spanish and English. This solution not only empowers authors to submit their articles in their native language but also broadens the pool of potential reviewers by enabling peer review to be conducted in the same language. The platform streamlines the publication process and enables the simultaneous publication of original and translated articles with no compromise in quality.

This solution offers numerous advantages to enhance Medwave’s publication process.

• It reduces inconsistencies between the original and translated versions of articles and eases the burden on human translators by automatically recycling non-translatable sections such as metadata, abstracts, keywords, and references.
• It has also led to increased efficiencies in the publication process, resulting in shorter review rounds, fewer human errors, and full automation of PDF typesetting and XML JATS files for publication, database deposits, and third-party preservation archiving. 
• In 2019, there was a gap of 31 days between the publication of the original Spanish article and its translated version. The bilingual workflow has eliminated the gap and enabled the simultaneous publication of both versions of the article. 
• As a result of the streamlined journal publication setup, Medwave has been able to remain financially sustainable.

By implementing a bilingual journal workflow and successfully addressing the challenges previously faced by the journal, this collaboration supports Medwave’s vision of increasing the dissemination of research to a wider audience. A bilingual journal workflow promotes inclusivity within the scientific community by providing equal access to research for researchers who may not be fluent in English. By enabling researchers and healthcare professionals to access medical research in both English and Spanish, this workflow eliminates language barriers within the scientific community and promotes cross-cultural exchange and understanding. It also encourages greater collaboration between researchers and healthcare professionals from different countries and language backgrounds, fostering diverse perspectives and innovative solutions to medical problems.

Finally, it can help increase the visibility and impact of research by reaching a larger audience, leading to more citations and recognition within the scientific community.

What are your plans for the future?

The future possibilities of expanding a bilingual journal workflow are vast and exciting. With the world becoming increasingly interconnected, there is a growing demand for research to be accessible in multiple languages. 

By expanding a bilingual journal workflow to include more languages, such as Chinese, Arabic, and F
rench, researchers are empowered to write in their native language and have their voices heard in the scholarly community. A multilingual journal workflow has the potential to enhance the visibility and impact of research by reaching an even wider audience. This can lead to more citations and recognition within the scientific community, as well as increased funding opportunities for researchers. Furthermore, expanding a bilingual journal workflow can help to promote inclusivity and diversity within the scientific community, as it ensures that researchers from all language backgrounds have access to the same research, leading to greater collaboration and innovation within the scientific community. 

The benefits and opportunities of expanding a bilingual journal workflow are immense and hold great promise for the future of research.

About the authors

Ravi Venkataramani, CEO of Kriyadocs, drives collaborative partnerships to enhance human potential through technology. Guided by his visionary leadership, Kriyadocs aims to revolutionize scholarly publishing with innovative solutions for researchers.

Dr. Vivienne C. Bachelet, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Medwave, launched the bilingual biomedical journal to bridge the education gap for Spanish-speaking clinicians, researchers, and academics in Chile. She is also an Associate Professor at the School of Medicine of the University of Santiago de Chile (USACH) and active member of prestigious medical organizations.

More information

Medwave website: https://www.medwave.cl/

Kriyadocs website: https://www.kriyadocs.com/

Kriyadocs LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/kriyadocs

Kriyadocs Twitter: @Kriyadocs 

Medwave Twitter: @Medwave_cl 

Ninth International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication poster, “A Technology-Based, Quality Improvement Intervention to Ensure Accuracy and Integrity of the Scholarly Record of Articles Published Simultaneously in 2 Languages” by Dr. Vivienne C. Bachelet, Amaya Goyenechea, Máximo Rousseau-Portalis https://peerreviewcongress.org/peer-review-congress-2022-program/.

References

*Bachelet, V., & Rousseau-Portalis, M. (2023). A technology-based, financially sustainable, quality improvement intervention in a medical journal for bilingualism from submission to publication. Learned Publishing, 36(1), 73-80. 10.1002/leap.1533

Spotlight on: Africa Commons

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the new ALPSP Impact Award. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

At Coherent Digital, we create online collections of critical research and learning materials. We contextualize them and provide tools and supporting materials so that they can be used for learning. We add content that's uncatalogued, undiscoverable, uncitable, prone to link rot, and likely to disappear. Where content is in danger of being lost forever, we make sure that it's stabilized, findable, and preserved in a permanent home.

We work with leading authors, publishers, nonprofits, libraries, and archives to amplify their voices—and help them remain sustainable through royalties from licensing.

Our award-winning Commons services make this possible, using machine indexing, AI, and manual techniques to catalog and enrich content at speed and at a low cost. Faculty can upload links or content, which becomes searchable and available within minutes. Over time, we enrich the content and build usage with new features, new links, and more context.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

We submitted the project Africa Commons: History and Culture.

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

Africa Commons: History and Culture is a collaborative project to preserve, digitize, and discover African cultural materials. It’s the largest index of African archives in the world. Users can cross-search more than 600 organizations, 4,300 collections, and nearly 450,000 documents in one, uniform site. With permission, we maintain copies of sites we index, so that if an item disappears, we’re able to provide a backup. 

Over the last two years, we have worked with a six-person Africa Commons Board of Advisors, made up of a distinguished group of African librarians from Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa. They have helped tremendously in guiding this project and keeping it relevant to Africa. They are:
Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata, (Board Chair), University Librarian, University of Lesotho 
Dr. Stephen Akintunde, Professor, University of Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria 
Dr. Elisha Rufaro Chiware, Library Director, Cape Peninsula University of Technology 
Dr. Perpetua S. Dadzie, Associate Professor, University of Ghana 
Dr. Tandi Lwoga, Professor and Deputy Rector, College of Business Education, Tanzania
Ms. Blessing Mawire, Senior Consultant and Director, Integra Professional Services

To provide some history on this project, we started with this challenge:

• Africa is home to approximately 17% of the world's population. Yet, research shows that African knowledge is severely underrepresented in digital spaces—making up only 4% of the world's digital knowledge.
• African archives and their collections are hard to find and access. Finding aids are scarce, and few items are digitized. That puts the materials at risk.
• Outside of Africa, such materials are scattered across thousands of collections with different indexing and user interfaces. They're hard to find and difficult to search; they can't easily be deployed for learning and research.

To help assist with this challenge: 

• We select and index high-quality materials from openly available collections across the world and provide a single powerful search that then links users back to the original sites. To date, we have indexed nearly 450,000 items, 600 organizations, and over 4,000 collections. Items include books, magazines, newspapers, historical journals, government documents, film, posters, manuscripts, letters, diaries, ephemera, photographs, art, music, videos, and oral histories. 
• Where rights permit, we make copies of digital artifacts so that items at risk of disappearing through lack of funds or organizational changes are preserved and safe.
• We also encourage users to contribute relevant links (if they don't hold copyright) and files (if they do hold copyright). Materials are published for the Africa Commons community minutes after submission.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates impact?

Africa Commons: History and Culture demonstrates impact by helping to make African content more widely available and accessible. Free access is provided to all institutions in Africa as well as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Institutions (outside of Africa) that subscribe or purchase the database directly support future digitization projects in Africa, with 10% of sales go directly toward working with African archives to select, digitize, and make rare collections accessible.

Since its launch in March of this year, 140 institutions worldwide have been granted either free or paid access. 

What are your plans for the future?

Africa Commons: History and Culture is a continually growing database. With the help of our Board of Advisors, as well as the academic community, we will continue to index digitized African content and work with African libraries to help digitize rare archival materials. We will continue to engage with the community of scholars who are using Africa Commons to solicit feedback and increase usage of the database.

Also, three additional digitization projects are already underway: Black South African Magazines, Southern African Films and Documentaries, and Eastern African Magazines, Newspapers, and Films. These three collections are in various stages, and we look forward to completing them in 2023.

About the authors

Elizabeth Robey, Publisher, Coherent Digital
Elizabeth has as worked in academic publishing since 2000, most recently for Alexander Street and ProQuest. She is the editor of many recognized databases, including Mindscape Commons (co-winner of the 2021 ALPSP Innovation Award).

Pete Ciuffetti, Chief Technology Officer, Coherent Digital
In a career spanning more than 35 years, Pete has held senior technical positions at seven different information providers, most of them start-ups or early-stage companies. He speaks at industry events on the use of machine learning in electronic publishing and advocates for accessibility in multimedia. 

More information

Company website: coherentdigital.net
Project website: africacommons.net 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coherentdigital/

Spotlight on: eLife's new publishing model

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the new ALPSP Impact Award. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization 

eLife is an independent nonprofit inspired by research funders and led by scientists. Since our inception in 2011, our mission has been to accelerate research through publishing, technology and culture reform. To support this goal in part, we review and publish preprints in the life sciences and medicine, and are committed to improving peer review to better convey the assessments made by editors and reviewers.

What is the project/product that you have submitted for the Awards?

In January this year, we launched our new model of scientific publishing that ends binary accept/reject decisions after peer review and focuses instead on providing high-quality public reviews and assessments. The output is a Reviewed Preprint, a new form of journal article that presents the research findings alongside public peer reviews, an eLife assessment – which clearly communicates the strengths and weaknesses of a paper at a glance – and a response from the authors, if available. This new process has been designed to provide a more transparent, faster and fairer way to publish research.

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

In our new model, all papers that are invited for peer review go through eLife’s usual consultative review process, led by experts in the respective field/s. The authors then receive the eLife assessment, public reviews, and confidential recommendations from the reviewers on how to improve their paper and are given the chance to provide a response. When the authors are ready, the Reviewed Preprint is posted on the eLife website, alongside the eLife assessment, public reviews and their response. They also receive a fully citable DOI link, which they can use in their funding, grant and job applications. Reviewed Preprints provide certainty of outcome to authors. They are able to include a response to the assessment and reviews with the Reviewed Preprint, and are entirely in control of what to do next; whether that’s to revise and resubmit their work, or declare the Reviewed Preprint as the final Version of Record, which is then indexed by PubMed. If they choose to revise, which can be done as many times as they wish to address concerns raised by the reviewers, the revised version is published on our website with an updated assessment and reviews. When they consider their work finished, and declare a final Version of Record, this is akin to a traditional journal article and meets the requirements outlined by funding organisations and research institutes. They can also choose to submit their Reviewed Preprint to another journal if they wish to do so. Effectively, in this new process, eLife is handing power over the publishing process to authors. 

This model has been developed over the last couple of years in collaboration with all teams at eLife. We have worked closely with our board of editors and reviewers to design and implement the system, including the controlled vocabulary used in the eLife assessments. This vocabulary has been carefully crafted so that the editors’ and reviewers’ thoughts on the merits of a paper are clearly communicated in a consistent manner for the benefit of readers. Behind the scenes, our technology teams have worked to develop a new software platform for the display and hosting of Reviewed Preprints, so that they can be updated on the same webpage for each revision, with the same umbrella DOI and links back to previous versions of the work for ease of access. The model is a truly organisation-wide effort built on input from eLife’s executive staff, editorial board, early-career advisors and many other key stakeholders.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation? 

The current scientific publishing system has seen very little innovation since its inception. It can be slow and frustrating for authors, with seemingly endless rounds of review, resubmission and rejections. It is also wasteful, with academics spending time on providing peer reviews and valuable insights that are lost when a paper is rejected. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for scientists to communicate their findings more quickly, leading to a significant jump in the number of papers published on preprint servers. Our approach to publishing combines the immediacy of preprints with the scrutiny of expert peer review. An eLife Reviewed Preprint can be online within just a few weeks of the authors receiving the reviews, speeding up the process for the benefit of scientists at all stages of their careers. Additionally, displaying public reviews and an eLife assessment alongside the Reviewed Preprints helps readers to assess the research based on its own merits, rather than judging the work simply on where it is published. 

What are your plans for the future?

eLife has always supported open science practices, including preprints, for increasing access to and transparency of research. Our hope is that Reviewed Preprints one day become the norm in science and that many diverse groups of authors are able to participate in and benefit from the process. To this end, we will continue to engage with the global science community, including researchers, funders, publishers and others, about the model. We hope that many other publishers will implement a flavour of the new model for themselves, bringing the benefits of Reviewed Preprints to even wider communities of authors and readers around the world.

About the author

Damian Pattinson is Executive Director at eLife. He started his publishing career at the BMJ, before joining PLOS ONE and later Research Square, where he launched the Research Square preprint server. He holds a PhD in Neuroscience from University College London.

More information

Website: https://elifesciences.org/

View all eLife Reviewed Preprints: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints

Twitter: https://twitter.com/eLife

Spotlight on: Schol-AR

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2023. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

Ardist Inc. is a California-based startup dedicated to enhancing the distribution of scientific data. Our team comprises talented individuals focused on providing technological tools to support the next generation of scientific communication for publishers, authors, and readers. Founded in 2019, Ardist received the University of Southern California Stevens Technology Commercialization Award in 2021 for our academic-rooted developments. In 2022, our first paper on the Schol-AR project was published in Nature Scientific Data (View Augmented at https://www.Schol-AR.io/publications/ard2022). As of 2023, we have been fully integrated into numerous journals, publishers, and international conference venues.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

Schol-AR transforms standard scientific PDF articles into fully digital entities, enabling the inclusion of interactive digital media and scientific data directly into manuscripts. Schol-AR is designed specifically to provide full digital integration in a manner that benefits the publishers, authors, and readers of the research community. An introductory video can be seen at https://www.Schol-AR.io/demo/

Readers can use Schol-AR to view any scientific data associated with an article, poster, or other communication via simple “point to view” mobile access or “click to open” browser access, which opens both an article and its data simultaneously. With Schol-AR readers don’t need to find URL links, gain access to databases, or install software to view specific types of data. Instead, we provide data intuitively and immediately, through the preferred medium of the reader. 

Authors can quickly and easily augment data and digital media into their publications through an accessible web interface at www.Schol-AR.io. Creating augmentations does not require any technical writing like XML, programming knowledge, or any other technical capabilities. Instead, authors simply upload the figures they would like to augment, and the data they would like to augment them with. Once done, authors immediately receive a QR code that when included in their document converts it into a fully digital augmented paper. The augmentation creation process is designed to take less than five minutes and allow authors to continue writing standard PDFs with the tools they are accustomed to. A demonstration of the process can be seen at https://www.Schol-AR.io/intro/.

Publishers can integrate Schol-AR with no technical requirements whatsoever, entirely averting the costly and risky technical overhauls otherwise needed to provide their readers and authors modern digital capabilities. Simply stated, if a publisher can distribute a PDF, then all Schol-AR’s capabilities are already fully available to them. This design spares publishers the time and effort necessary to develop, deploy, and maintain complex digital systems as well as providing technical support for authors who utilize those systems. Instead, publishers receive fully digital-inclusive augmented articles from the first stage of the submission process. Schol-AR augmented articles also streamline the editorial process, as the augmentations are seamlessly accessible to editors and peer reviewers throughout submission, just as they are to all readers after full publication.

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

Schol-AR was developed by the Ardist team to enhance scientific communication through fully accessible digital integration. Our system utilizes augmented reality (AR) and computer vision (CV) technologies to seamlessly layer data onto figures for easy viewing. Instead of attaching data to specific submission systems, we directly attach it to the figures, making the data viewable wherever the images are seen. The framework supporting these capabilities encompasses technologies across iOS, Android, webGL, web server, and cloud computing. Despite the complexity of Schol-AR's infrastructure, the resulting product offers simple and intuitive access for both readers and authors.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation? 

Schol-AR provides an entire digital overhaul to the journal article in a way that is seamlessly integrated into the existing publishing system. Instead of attempting to replace the PDF with a fully digital standard, we augment the PDF with the simple addition of a QR code. This approach removes the considerable barrier of requiring every publisher to implement a new technology into their systems in order to provide digitally inclusive documents, ultimately enabling immediate global accessibility across all journals everywhere. This does not only benefit publishers, but also authors who no longer need to consider if a particular submission system will accommodate their specific form of data. Once augmented through Schol-AR, a document can be submitted anywhere and data will automatically accompany it. Additionally, Schol-AR provides dramatically improved accessibility to readers in both digital accessed and printed articles, facilitating intuitive data inclusion across mediums. Lastly, Schol-AR is broadly supportive of multiple discipline-spanning media formats including interactive 3D models, image stacks, videos, and volumetric data. 

What are your plans for the future?

The Schol-AR project has been implemented across numerous journals, publishers, and conference venues to improve the data accessibility of journal articles and posters. However, the project is still new, and we have many plans to expand both the general adoption of Schol-AR as well as the services we provide. For example, while augmentations can currently be automatically created from numerous types of media, we plan to expand support across a much wider range of data formats and associated visualization styles. Further, our digital architecture is well suited to provide additional capabilities, such as communication between authors and readers and access to numerous additional article-related digital services. This project is just getting started, and we are eager to continue advancing digital scholarly communication with Schol-AR. 

About the author

Tyler Ard is the CEO of Ardist Inc., and Assistant Professor at the USC Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute. Dr. Ard has decades of experience in cutting edge data visualization, publication, research, and digital distribution. 

More information

https://www.Schol-AR.io/demo/

Spotlight on: BMJ Impact Analytics

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2023. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

As a global healthcare knowledge provider with a vision for a healthier world, BMJ publishes one of the world’s top five most cited general medical journals, The BMJ, and over 65 specialty journals. BMJ also offers digital professional development courses and clinical decision support tools to help health professionals improve the quality of healthcare delivery. 

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

BMJ Impact Analytics is the first impact tool focused on health and social care. Developed in collaboration with Overton, BMJ Impact Analytics makes it easy to find, track, and share the real-world impact of health and medical research. It uniquely shows direct links to patient outcomes (decision support tools) and provides citations in context.

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

Research that improves patients' lives matters deeply to the funders, institutions and researchers but is time-consuming and difficult to track. Traditional scholarly metrics were used to evaluate the impact of this research in the absence of more targeted analysis that specifically relates to health improvement. 

BMJ Impact Analytics was created after extensive engagement and research with medical departments, researchers and funders. It was developed in collaboration with pioneering technology start-up Overton, whose mission is to support evidence-based decision-making worldwide by tracking the reach and impact of research in policy. Our co-development combines BMJ's health expertise with Overton's data knowledge to address the challenge of finding evidence of their real-world impact of health and medical research. Funders, institutions, and researchers can now effectively find evidence of their influence; by tracking where their research is cited in clinical guidance and health policy worldwide.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

• BMJ Impact Analytics is the only impact tool created in collaboration with medical departments, researchers and funders, specifically addressing the needs of the medical research community. 
• It is the most up-to-date and comprehensive tool available to track and share the real-world impact of medical and health research. 
• Strengthened by continuous feedback from medical departments, researchers and funders, this powerful tool encompasses the broadest range of the best available medical sources worldwide, including local guidelines and decision-support tools used by healthcare professionals at the point of care.
• BMJ Impact Analytics uses modern technology and machine learning to help discover evidence of impact,  provides context on how research was used and uniquely shows where research is making a difference closest to the patient. 

What are your plans for the future?

Since launching earlier this year, we have been delighted with how the health and medical research communities have received BMJ Impact Analytics. We will continue to work closely with these groups as part of our user-centred approach to developing and prioritising new features on the roadmap. 

About the author

Michelle Phillips is the Open Research Product Manager at BMJ. With over 15 years of publishing experience, she is passionate about real-world impact. She has been very fortunate to have collaborated with many inspiring researchers on bridging the gap between research, policy and, ultimately, real-world outcomes.

More information:

Website: https://impactanalytics.bmj.com/

Twitter: @bmj_company

Spotlight on: IOP Publishing double anonymous peer review and transparent peer review

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the new ALPSP Impact Award. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

IOP Publishing is a society-owned scientific publisher, delivering impact, recognition, and value to the scientific community. Our purpose is to expand the world of physics, offering a portfolio of journals, eBooks, conference proceedings and science news resources globally. Our aim is to publish the latest and best research in the physical sciences and beyond, and make that research available to as many people as possible.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of the Institute of Physics (IOP), a not-for-profit society, our net income goes directly to the IOP to assist their mission to help everyone build their knowledge of physics and to provide professional support for physicists.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

To fight bias and lack of transparency in peer review, IOP Publishing has introduced two complementing peer review methods: double anonymous peer review and transparent peer review. Double anonymous review is applied during the peer review process, before acceptance, and transparent review is delivered post-acceptance through the publication of the reviewer reports and author responses. Together these two processes complement each other, allowing for maximum objectivity during the review process, and maximum transparency after publication. The first results show that these two complementary methods have a positive impact on the peer review process. They help tackle the significant under-representation of authors due to gender, racial, affiliation and geographical bias and address the lack of transparency and sharing of best practices in peer review.  

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

Introducing double anonymous peer review involved not only technological changes to our submission system (Clarivate), but also some considerable changes to our internal processes. Setting up transparent peer review was a major technological challenge and, to do so, we partnered with Publons to develop a highly efficient solution in which the relevant peer review data is automatically transferred between systems (peer review, production and web platforms) via APIs, without the need for manual intervention. A key element of the introduction of these two peer review methods was communication with our author and reviewer communities making sure they could appreciate why we were making these changes. It’s taken us about twelve months to migrate all our journals onto the new workflows, with the help from a specialist project team of editorial, technical, marketing and other supporting colleagues. 

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

IOP Publishing (IOPP) is the first society publisher to combine double anonymous peer review and transparent peer review throughout its entire portfolio of owned open access journals. Even though, double anonymous peer review and transparent peer review are not new concepts in themselves, combining the two methods is innovative. The two peer review methods complement each other and together they deliver significant positive change to our peer review process and we’re beginning to see some fascinating results. For example, authors from Africa are more than twice as likely to have their work accepted under double anonymous, compared to single anonymous! 

What are your plans for the future?

We are planning to roll out transparent peer review to all of our journals (including our partner journals) by the end of 2024. At the moment, we only publish the peer review history if both the authors and reviewers of a paper opt in. We may remove the opt in/out option so that all reviewer reports and author replies will be made public alongside all published papers. With regards to the roll-out of our double anonymous peer review policy, we intend to share our learnings and insights and are exploring automated solutions to help more authors effectively anonymise their work. 

About the author

Kim Eggleton, Peer Review and Research Integrity Manager, IOP Publishing

Twitter: @IOPPublishing
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ioppublishing/
LinkedIn: IOP Publishing

More information: 
IOP Publishing launches portfolio-wide transparent peer review on its OA journals.

IOP Publishing commits to adopting double-anonymous peer review for all journals.