Pluto’s Q4 Planning

What, Why and How Pluto will do in Q4 2018

안녕하세요(greetings in Korean)! This is team pluto.
We had a big meeting last Monday (October 1st, the start Q4 of Korea standard) to set a new OKR(Objectives and key results) for Q4.

In this post, we share the result of meeting about what, why and how we will do in the Q4.

Current status of Scinapse

Based on data from Scinapse, we have found the following with GA (Google Analytics):

1. We have confirmed that Scinapse is giving users more than average experience as ‘academic search engine’. Based on PV (Page Views) and SD (Session Duration) score, we have a little less score than Google Scholar but have a better score than another search service, PubMed, CiteSeerX or Semantic Scholar.
2. Currently, Scinapse acquires most of its sessions through Paper show page. But sadly, we checked that majority of users who came to a Paper show page leave the site without moving to other pages in Scinapse. The reason we thought: 1) Most users coming through aPaper show page have the purpose that is to get full-texts of the paper. 2) If there is a pdf download link or a source link, they enter the link and leave Scinapse. Or if there is no pdf download link or source link, they just leave Scinapse. 3) That is, Paper show page leads users to a few actions, such as click, but it does not induce any other interaction. In conclusion, Scinapse has the flow that makes the users leave the site whether they achieve their purpose or not.
3. Author show page is the third most inflow into Scinapse but has the highest bounce rate. Having a high bounce rate means that almost all user who visits Author show page leaves without any interaction.

To sum it up, Scinapse is a service with a good score as an academic search engine but does not deliver enough experiences for users to make other interactions and to revisit. Thus, we set Q4 OKR to improve on these problems.

Q4 Objective (goal)

Objective 1. Make Scinapse a service that users can actively use
During Q4, one of our objectives is to develop into a service that users can actively use and stay. This objective includes our desire that Scinapse will be a meaningful service that gives users the value of ‘discovery’, not just a search.

Objective 2. Make participation of the research community
We’ve been communicating with various researchers since we started this project. But we need MORE HELP from people in the research community. Therefore, in Q4, we will be more active in communicating the research community to get their participation.

Objective 3. Make the best practice based on Open project identity
Unlike traditional business, open project is a way to define problem publicly and gradually solve them together. It has keywords such as Open, Collaborative, Transparent, and Inclusive.
We hope Scinapse grows up as open project. So we’re doing some groundwork to make Scinapse Open project, and we set the objective that makes a best practice in this Q4. The condition of best practice is that there are more external people involved than Pluto team, all information(source, data, etc) is opened, and everyone can participate anytime.

What we will do in Q4 to achieve OKR

Each of us shared ideas for improving Scinapse in the meeting. Ideas included improvements to existing features, new features, business strategy, and so forth. It would be nice to apply all these ideas, but in reality, it is impossible. So we organized ideas based on objectives and selected the most promising ones.

To achieve Objective 1
We have decided to enhance the service in a way that promotes users to actively interact and stay longer.

• Instant full-texts and annotations
  For Open Access articles, we will deliver the full-texts directly on the article pages on Scinapse, along with some new features such as highlighting or notes. For non-OA articles, the same will be applied only to the abstracts.
• Improve paper discovery
  We will focus on ideas that can improve Paper show page and Author show page to provide more meaningful information to users. This includes feature ideas such as providing the latest research trends or etc.

To achieve Objective 2
For this, we will try a variety of things. We do not have specific plans not yet, but we will do our best to communication various people in the research community to get their help through SNS or etc.

To achieve Objective 3
We’ve been adopting a Task Forces (TF) model for our workflow, to enable external supporters to engage in the project in a lean way. We want to make a decent precedent with one of our current TFs, to get the grasp of best practice for open project. Two notable examples are:

• Author Disambiguation (Database normalization)
  This TF was made for normalizing metadata on academic graphs that is scattered sporadically and varies from source to source. Specifically, members are using data-mining techniques to disambiguate authors on our database. That is, to merge the author objects that refer to the same person, and to split into different author objects when different persons are tied up. Currently, the TF involves two members of Pluto and three data scientists outside Pluto.
• Experiment A: Incentivized open research cooperation
  We think that the current academic paper is not good enough to deliver one’s knowledge to others. In general, academic papers only contain the shortest path to prove their hypotheses while omitting a lot of contexts arising in the study. However, the things which are not included in academic papers are important parts of the research. They could make readers deeply understand the research and do a critical role to generate new ideas. We think that sharing every discussion related to the research is the better scholarly communication method than simply sharing well-organized academic papers. As a result, we are planning a pilot program with this TF, to prove the following hypotheses.
  1.Collaboration among researchers could accelerate the research.
  2.It makes the readers better understand the research to share all discussion records related to the research.
  3. Giving financial incentive to researchers could lower the barriers to participating open science project and the possibility of damaging their academic career.

Pluto is always OPEN !

Pluto team always wants to make it an open project. We believe that these activities will break down the barriers in academia and contribute to the development of science. Please feel free to contact us to participate in these activities at any time. Maybe in the next post, we will share the details about “Pluto and open project”.

Thank you.

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Email: team@pluto.network