Thomson Reuters launches startup incubator focusing on big data
Thomson Reuters have announced the launch of Thomson Reuters Labs – The Incubator. The incubator, based in Switzerland, will host early-stage entrepreneurs building products based on big data, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and other transformational technologies. Startups on the programme will receive access to Thomson Reuters data and content sets, as well as mentoring and networking opportunities. The incubator is part of Thomson Reuters Labs network.
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2017/july/thomson-reuters-launches-startup-incubator.html
Scholarly collaboration networks: Kudos announces publisher pilot for managing and tracking author sharing
Kudos has announced a pilot programme to help publishers prevent copyright infringement and reclaim lost usage from sharing of research articles on scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs). The first publishers to participate in this approach to managing and understanding usage via SCNs include the American Thoracic Society, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, The Institution of Engineering and Technology, and the MIT Press.
“Many publishers embrace the idea of authors doing everything they can to maximise the visibility of their work, including maintaining a profile in sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu,” says Charlie Rapple, co-founder of Kudos. “The challenge is to ensure sharing is copyright compliant, and to measure usage happening in such platforms so that authors, institutions, funders and others can easily gain a comprehensive understanding of the interest in and readership of an author’s work.” The pilot runs through to the end of 2017.
https://blog.growkudos.com/2017/07/13/kudos-pilot-for-managing-sharing-networks/
Birkbeck to investigate the peer review process
Birkbeck, University of London is to investigate the workings of the academic peer review process, backed by a $99,000 research grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
"Every academic in the world is familiar with peer review," says Martin Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, who will lead the research team. “However, surprisingly little is known about what peer review looks like at scale. Using a set of cross-disciplinary methodologies, we will study the writing patterns of reviewers and look for trends that can give us insight into how reviewers respond to requests for evaluation."
The project, entitled ‘Reading Peer Review,' will analyse the role of peer review in the research cycle to develop better ways of using expert opinion to assess and improve the literature available. It will investigate the peer review database at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world. The reports, which will be strictly anonymised and treated as confidential, will be examined using a range of close-reading, distant-reading, and stylometric approaches.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/birkbeck-to-investigate-the-peer-review-process-in-new-research-project
BBC Monitoring joins OpenAthens
BBC Monitoring has joined the OpenAthens Federation, enabling it to expand its commercial customer base worldwide. Commercial customers currently include media organisations, foreign governments, NGOs, universities, embassies, security groups, news agencies, think tanks and international businesses.
"As part of our wider commercial strategy of licencing our services to both UK and international universities, OpenAthens means we can offer simple and authenticated access for customers who wish to enable single sign on for a large number of users. Adding OpenAthens offers another option for universities outside the UK to access BBC Monitoring's subscription services", said Markus Ickstadt, director of Business Development, BBC Monitoring.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2017/bbc-monitoring-openathens
Winner of the IFLA Green Library Award 2017 announced
The German public library Stadtbibliothek Bad Oldesloe is this year’s winner of the IFLA Green Library Award.
The award was established in 2016 and aims to recognise commitment to environmental sustainability and to create awareness of libraries’ social responsibility and leadership in environmental education.
The Bad Oldesloe project, ‘Ernte deine Stadt – Harvest Your City: Three Years of Green and Sustainable Library Commitment in the Stadtbibliothek Bad Oldesloe’ combines urban gardening with makerspaces and community building efforts.
https://www.ifla.org/node/11523