Skip to main content

Strengthening Pub and Community Connections

Your July 2020 PubPub newsletter
Published onJul 16, 2020
Strengthening Pub and Community Connections
·

PubPub newsletter subscribers received this newsletter on July 15, 2020. You can view it here on Mailchimp. Consider subscribing to our monthly newsletters for updates about the platform, news from our communities, and things we’re thinking about.


Hello all, 

This month has brought about some exciting new features and fixes on PubPub, along with the growth of our own team and the communities we support. Please join us in welcoming Eric McDaniel, Senior Software Engineer, to our team! We're also hiring an Editorial Manager to support our content production and the work many of you are spearheading on PubPub (more details in our Endnote). 

PubPub has always helped communities experiment with new forms of publishing, and then formalizing the successes in code. Our new dev features this month, and some community news and suggested readings, reflect this process in action.

Big thanks for being here,
Your PubPub team


Pub Connections

One of the things many communities, especially the Harvard Data Science Review, have been experimenting with is publishing commentary and community conversation on pubs as their own first-party objects. The newly launched Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 journal from the MIT Press and UC Berkeley School of Public Health will be taking this a step further by publishing reviews of works off the platform — typically on preprint servers. So, we’re building this capability into PubPub.
Starting this week, you’ll see a new “Connections” tab in the pub dashboard, where you’ll be able to add indicators that one pub is related to another pub — or to another piece of content on the web. And starting in two weeks, you’ll be able to deposit those pubs to Crossref with typed relationships so that anyone can query for them — creating new possibilities for folks who write vital commentary about scholarly work to be discovered. We’re super excited to see what journal clubs, overlay journals, retraction watch blogs, and others do with this feature. If you have questions or ideas for how to expand this feature, please let us know!

Impact metrics

Better analytics has been one of our most-requested features, but was also one of the hardest and most expensive to implement in a way that upholds our values of transparency and privacy for our users. So, we’ve spent a ton of time switching analytics providers, building an analytics pipeline, and adopting a dashboard platform that we fully control. In the new Impact tab, you can now see a full range of metrics at the Community and pub level, and filter it by date. We have data going back to early 2018, though there was a data discrepancy between the two sources that is described in this discourse post. We can also add metrics to the dashboard fairly easily, so if you have ideas of what you’d like to see, please let us know.

Bulk Imports

We now support importing pubs in bulk from a variety of formats, including Wordpress exports, ePub bundles, and more. For now, bulk imports must be run by a member of our team, so if you’re interested, please send us an email to [email protected].


Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 Launch

The MIT Press announced the launch of Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), an open access, rapid-review overlay journal that will accelerate peer review of COVID-19-related research and deliver real-time, verified scientific information that policymakers and health leaders can use. It's led by Stefano M. Bertozzi and an editorial team based at University of California Berkeley.

Design Justice

The next chapter of Design Justice, "Design Sites: Hackerspaces, Fablabs, Hackathons, and DiscoTechs," is now live to read here. Additional chapters of this title by Sasha Costanza-Chock will be made open on the first Thursday of each month through September. Read along with us!

Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy

JBLP, which published both on PubPub and in print, launched Vol. 3 No. 2 this month. Read this issue, and previous ones, here. The print version will be available this fall.

Public Media Stack

After launching a report last month, the Public Media Stack is now building a community on PubPub! They're hoping for feedback, tips, and contributions from those working in public media to improve and further the report.

New KFG Programs

The Knowledge Futures Group announced four new programs: Knowledge Ecosystems, Universal Data, Community Publishing, and Measuring Knowledge to take on hard cultural and technical challenges. Learn more about them here.

Do you have community news? Please share it with us at [email protected]  for inclusion in our next newsletter!


The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech: What has not been questioned enough during the COVID-19 crisis is unrelenting capitalism itself by Safiya Noble in Noēma

"What Black scientists want from colleagues and their institutions" by Virginia Gewin in Nature

"The Trayvon Generationby Elizabeth Alexander in the New Yorker

"How to Make Better Friends with the Terrible Feelings You’re Feeling" by Whitney Philips in the Commonplace

"Remarking on Annotation" by Remi Kalir in the Commonplace

"Analytics Tools Landscape Summary" by Gabe Stein in KFG Notes

"A systematic examination of preprint platforms for use in the medical and biomedical sciences setting" by Jamie J Kirkham, Naomi Penfold, Fiona Murphy, Isabelle Boutron, John PA Ioannidis,  Jessica K Polka, David Moher in bioRxiv


We're Hiring!

The KFG is hiring an Editorial Manager to help curate and produce content for PubPub and Commonplace. We’re looking for someone with strong writing and editorial skills, knowledge of academic publishing, and interest in experimenting with new publishing practices. Please apply or share the job description!

A New Newsletter

Commonplace, a publication of the KFG, is launching a monthly newsletter called 5 Things to Think About. With a different curator each month, this email intends to land in your inbox with surprising, thought-provoking items (readings, art, sites, happenings) that bring you somewhere new. Learn about upcoming contributors and sign up here.

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?