This week in PubTech — 11 May 2018
Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about.
Measuring impact and usage
Melissa Grant, Lucy Vernall and Kirsty Hill have measured the impact of health-related research broadcast on prime time television and found that participants’ understanding of the issues had been enhanced and some had changed their behaviours as a result of the research (research paper here).
Digital Science have a new report which found that policy makers make up the primary community engaging with Malaria research, whilst practitioners and mainstream news outlets were most prominent for Alzheimer’s disease. Also from Digital Science, Jean Liu and Euan Adie talk about the ideas that underpin Altmetric.com and the company’s role in providing responsible metrics in this podcast.
Lorraine Estelle of COUNTER, Stuart Maxwell of Scholarly IQ, and Iris Hanney of Unlimited Priorities discuss COUNTER credentialing and how the COUNTER standards allow libraries and publishers to assess value in the Authority File podcast. There’s also a fascinating insight into how COUNTER came into being.
Redesings
The New York Times has a new design for its article page with a single-column layout that strips away clutter. “It was the first time we were able to have a unified experience for readers and advertisers from the beginning. I and my team sat side by side with product design, newsroom reps.” Google is revamping Google Newswith a new design that will incorporate elements of the Newsstand app and YouTube. Finally, Òscar Oto provides some practical advice about three design thinking techniques that provide specific, focused, and weighted feedback for gathering data ahead of doing a redesign.
Apps and digital editions
Dan Amos has a good summary of Google I/O and how it will impact app development. The Global Editors Network and Twipe have a new report about ‘Reinventing Digital Editions’ to understand the best practices of successful digital-only editions.
Richard Holden, Product Manager for mobile apps @TheEconomist writes about how the new mobile app for The Economist has been designed to deliver what users want.
Quick links
- As always Ian Mulvany has some interesting thoughts about trends in big data and the role of the library
- Paul Shannon describes how eLife’s fantastic open source platform Libero is being developed
- Richard Gingras, VP of Google News talks about the subscription process for digital news-readers
And finally…
It would be hard to round up the week without mentioning Google’s new assistant that can make phone calls on your behalf.
