Spotlight on Publons - shortlisted for the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

On the 14th of September we will be anouncing the winner of the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by MPS Limited at the 10th Anniversary ALPSP Conference.  In this series of posts leading up to the Awards ceremony we meet our six finalists and get to know a bit more about them.  

First up, we speak to Andrew Preston, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Publons. 

Tell us a bit about your company

Publons is the home of peer review. Our cross-publisher platform collects peer review activity, providing researchers with a verified record of all of their reviewing contributions. Publons makes it possible to:

●     Recognise the contributions of reviewers worldwide

●     Improve and expand the reviewer pool through our free online training course

●     Gain novel insights into global peer review and researcher behaviour

●     Find, screen, contract, and motivate reviewers (an important part of an editor's job)

All of these threads feed into our mission to speed up research through the power of peer review.

 

What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

We submitted the Publons reviewer recognition service. This is essentially what you find on Publons.com and comprises of a free offering for researchers and a paid service for publishers.

 

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

Researchers sign up to create a free account. Publons then makes it really easy to import, verify, and store a record of every peer review they've performed and every manuscript they've handled as an editor, across any journal in the world. Researchers also have access to personal statistics and a downloadable, verified review record, which provides evidence of their service and standing in their field.

Records can be added regardless of whether the manuscript goes on to be published. Publons works with researchers and journals to set policies about what information can be displayed publicly. We support all review policies, ranging from completely open to double-blind, and we also enable post-publication review.

Partner journals are able to add Publons to their peer review workflow. Every time a researcher reviews for one of our 1,350 partner journals they are able to opt in to have their review seamlessly added to their Publons record. Researchers love this, making it really easy for a publisher to provide an enhanced service to reviewers.

 

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

Peer review is at the heart of the research ecosystem. We rely on it to validate findings, evaluate their importance, and to flag issues in the publication. When peer review suffers, so does the quality, pace, and public perception of research.

Publons is the first platform to bring some transparency to the peer review process. It took significant technical innovation to develop the infrastructure to handle the peer review policy and editorial management system for really any journal in the world. The scale of uptake -- 180,000 reviewers and 1,350 journals from many of the top publishers in the world -- highlights the importance of the market need we're filling.

What are you plans for the future?

Publons was recently acquired by Clarivate Analytics. Together, as a trusted neutral player in the market, we believe we can tackle the challenge of bringing trust and efficiency to peer review at scale. We plan to expand our offering to make it even easier for researchers to get recognition for their work and for publishers to have a deeper understanding of researcher workload and expertise.

Right now though we are preparing for Peer Review Week - a global event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality and looking forward to finding out who the winners of the Publons Peer Review Awards are too.

Publons Co-Founders - Andrew Preston (right) & Daniel Johnston
 Photo by: Image Service,Victoria University of  Wellington

Andrew Preston is the co-founder and Managing Director of Publons. He was an active researcher in physics, first as a PhD student at Victoria University of Wellington, then as postdoctoral researcher at Boston University. He founded Publons with a mission to speed up research by improving peer review. Publons recognises reviewers for their work and -- with more than 170,000 researchers and over 1,350 partner journals -- is the world’s largest peer review platform. Publons was acquired by Clarivate Analytics in June 2017. 

Website: www.publons.com

Twitter: @arhpreston @publons  
Facebook: facebook.com/publons
Publons: https://publons.com/author/1/andrew-preston
LinkedIn: http://nz.linkedin.com/in/arhpreston/

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd. 

Spotlight on SourceData - shortlisted for the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

Last but not least in our series of blogs on our 2017 Awards Finalists is EMBO – the creators of SourceData. We speak to Project Leader Thomas Lemberger to find out more:

Tell us a bit about your organisation

EMBO is an international organization that promotes scientific excellence in Life Sciences.It has over 1700 members elected from the leading researchers of Europe and beyond. The organization is funded by 29 member states to provide support to scientists through events, networking opportunities, funding and fellowships for young researchers and shaping science policy. EMBO also publishes four journals reporting important discoveries from the global bioscience community: EMBO Journal, EMBO Reports, Molecular Systems Biology and EMBO Molecular Medicine.

What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

SourceData is a technology platform made up of several tools that extract information about published figures and make scientific data more discoverable.Through EMBO’s work at the intersection of research and publishing we realized there is a disconnect between the way research data is published in scientific papers and the way researchers typically want to interact with it.  Most scientific papers report the results of carefully-designed experiments producing well-structured data. Unfortunately, during the publishing process this data is typically summarised in text and graphs and “flattened down” thus losing a lot of valuable information along the way.   As a result, it can be very difficult for researchers to find answers to relatively simple questions because data is inaccessible.

For example, it is currently very cumbersome for a scientist to find specific experiments where a certain small molecule drug has been tested on a specific cancer cell line or to look at the results of a published experiment and find out whether similar data had been published elsewhere. These are the kinds of scenario where SourceData can help. SourceData goes to the heart of the scientific paper - the data - and extracts its description in a usable format that researchers can access and interrogate. It then goes on to link this data to results from other scientific papers that have been through the same process.

 

SourceData - Making Scientific Data Discoverable from SourceData on Vimeo.
 

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

With SourceData, EMBO has developed a way to represent the structure of experiments. The principle of SourceData is rather simple: we identify the biological objects that are involved in the experiment and then we specify which objects were measured to produce the data and which, if any, were experimentally manipulated by the researchers. Despite its apparent simplicity, this method allows us to build a scientific knowledge graph that turns out to be a very powerful tool for searching and linking papers and their data.

The development of SourceData has been a collaborative process involving the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics who provided their expertise in developing software platforms in the field of Life Sciences and the curation of data.  After this we worked with Wiley to implement SourceData within a publishing environment. Nature also contributed content to the initiative.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

SourceData transforms the way that researchers can interact with scientific papers by getting to the heart of the paper - the data, and putting it into a highly searchable form. It then takes this a step further by linking this data with relevant results from other scientific papers so that researchers can explore these connections.SourceData can give readers a new level of confidence in finding more of the research that is relevant to their questions. It can give scientists more opportunities to have their publications found and cited and can allow publishers to expose more of their content to interested readers by making it even easier to search and explore.

What are your plans for the future?

Our work to date has involved a lot of manual work so we are now working to automate this process. We are developing artificial intelligence algorithms using deep learning to extract the structure of an experiment from their descriptions in natural language.  Our vision is to provide access to our technology to as many publishers as possible and encourage the widespread adoption of SourceData. In doing so we hope to facilitate access to the data behind more and more journals over time and ultimately accelerate Science in the process.


Thomas Lemberger is leading the SourceData project and is passionate about the importance of scientific data and structured knowledge in publishing. Trained as a molecular biologist, Thomas is Deputy Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO and Chief Editor of the open access journal Molecular Systems Biology.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/embocomm
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EMBO.excellence.in.life.sciences

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd. 

Spotlight on Delta Think - shortlisted for the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

In the second of our series of interviews with our ALPSP awards finalists we talk to Ann Michael, President of Delta Think.

·         Tell us a bit about your company

Delta Think is a business and technology consulting firm focused on innovation and growth in scholarly publishers and membership organizations. Founded at the height of the transition from print to digital, our core purpose is helping organizations to manage change. We live at the intersection of content, technology and user experience, and help our clients through the many changes impacting scholarly publishers and membership organizations.

·         What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

The Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool  (OA DAT) is a living compilation of industry data, anonymized private data and analysis, which provides a comprehensive view of the OA market.

The idea originated with questions arising during consulting engagements. We found commonality in questions clients asked about OA, with no clear consolidated, reliable data source to address them. We saw an opportunity to serve the industry more effectively by curating such a data set, and supplementing it with analysis, commentary, and visualizations.

·         Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

The OA DAT includes several levels of analysis and data access to accommodate any organization’s available bandwidth, comfort level with data analytics, and budget. We’ve worked hard to build a consistent view of the market and to make existing silos of data interoperate to deliver new insights, supplementing them with publisher confidential data (de-identified and aggregated).

The tool includes interactive visualizations so users can extract meaning for real-world decision-making, while providing a quick way to tailor the tool to areas of interest with a few mouse clicks. There is a sample interactive visualization and a brief video on our website , and a few static images below.

Additionally, we curate and aggregate OA industry news and combine it with a short analysis to publish Delta Think’s OA News & Views, which is available free of charge with registration.

We launched the Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool in beta to pre-launch subscribers in December of 2016, with our full launch in January of 2017. The tool is continually updated. To keep the product current and the user base growing, we work with two core data analysts (one with deep database experience), a research associate, product manager, project manager, marketer, and a business development resource

© 2017 Delta Think, Inc. All rights reserved. May not be reused without permission

·         Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

We had two key motivations in developing the tool: generally increasing industry data proficiency, and specifically supporting organizations as they make data driven strategic and ongoing decisions around Open Access. While several organizations have the bandwidth and budget to develop data analytics expertise, most find using data in decision making aspirational and, at best, episodic. It is not a part of their normal workflow.

On one level, our innovation is pulling disparate information together and continually updating it to provide benchmarks and genuinely novel insights into the Open Access market.

But the innovation goes much deeper: In a single product, we have created the means for any organization to use data in OA decision making on an ongoing basis.

·       Organizations not equipped to interact with the underlying data can read the analysis and benefit from its regular updates. They don’t have to wait a year or two for an analyst report to be refreshed.

·       Organizations looking to interact with the data can manipulate visualizations, narrowing in on elements important to them (e.g., geographic region, subspecialty, year, etc.).

·       Organizations equipped to gather, normalize, and analyze data and knowing the questions they want answered can export OA DAT data, combine it with proprietary data, and complete their own analyses. They can also use OA DAT to save time and effort in data collection, allowing them to focus more on their proprietary analysis.

·        For any of the above, our consulting resources support targeted research or produce custom reports.

The tool is valuable and accessible to the expert or the novice.

·         What are your plans for the future?

We currently focus on STM + Social Science, OA, Journals, as well as not-for-profit and commercial publishers. We plan to extend product coverage to books, open data, and even overall scholarly output (overlaying analytics on top of the usual indexes). We also plan to extend to institutional markets (both librarians and research departments) and other industry players interested in Open Access. Additionally, we are in confidential discussions with many potential data and tech partners.

Our bigger picture goal is to create extensions to the Delta Think Open Access Data Analytics Tool and develop other products or services supporting scholarly publishers, membership organizations, and the multitude of players in the scholarly communications ecosystem to build data and business analytics into their culture and their workflows.

Ann Michael is President of Delta Think, a business and technology consulting and advisory firm focused on innovation and growth in membership organizations and scholarly publishers. Ann is a Past President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), an NFAIS board member, a Board Director at Joule (a Canadian Medical Association company), a frequent organizer and speaker at industry conferences, and is a contributor to the SSP’s blog, The Scholarly Kitchen. 

Website: https://deltathink.com

Twitter: @deltathink @annmichael
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annmichael
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/delta-think
Facebook:  facebook.com/deltathink

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.