This week in PubTech — 4 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.
Publishing
The Harvard Digital Publishing Collaborative explore what publishing production and editorial functions can learn from how software developers with Andrew Savikas, former CEO of Safari who also ran the Tools of Change for Publishing conferences. Andrew talks about the difficulties of XML first workflows and newer approaches which particularly resonated with us.
Iain Cheeseman is advocating for publishing peer review and presents a number arguments in favor of transparent peer review. Molly Flatt reports on how Taylor & Francis have used Unsilo to make relevant book suggestions and achieve conversion rate just under 20%.
Roger C. Schonfeld is thinking about how to create a truly seamless platform for academic publishing and what this means for publisher platforms whilst the 1findr service from 1science is trying to create this discovery platform using harvesters that automatically collect, parse, complete and validate metadata from information online.
A new paper by Nir Grinberg identifies five types of reading behaviors: “Scan,” “Read,” “Read (long),” “Idle,” and “Shallow” and how they vary across different types of articles, sites, and mobile and nonmobile devices. At some point we’ll have a go at applying this to our articles to see if it matches our expectations.
Healthcare
Mark Skilton writes about seven technologies that will revolutionise healthcare.
Experimentation and Creativity
Matthew Monahan from Arc Publishing talks about how they are using technology experiments to drive growth at The Washington Post:
Outfast Source has a nice article about making an MVP part of your development strategy. Bethan Jinkinson from BBC Ideas reflects on what they have learnt so far, basically that there is an audience for informative short-form factual digital video. Finally, the Harvard Business Review finally finds evidence to support the saying “Write drunk, edit sober” in an article about how drunk People Are Better at Creative Problem Solving.
