Sciety product news 09/10/2024

The latest platform news from sciety.org, the home of community preprint evaluation.

🚀 What's new?

UX improvements

This week we've made some changes to the way subject categories work. We've made it easier to explore by subject from any Sciety page by adding an 'Explore' link to the navigation.

This also means that Explore (sciety.org/explore) is now decoupled from Search (sciety.org/search)

🔭 What's next?

Subject categories

We've heard that not all evaluated preprints are visible within the biomedical categories on our explore page, so we're looking into using OpenAlex topic categorisation to ensure all relevant work is included.

Access Microbiology

Work will continue to represent preprint evaluations from our colleagues at the Microbiology Society.

DocMaps

We will make improvements to the DocMaps to surface more of the metadata associated with community peer evaluation. Sciety DocMaps create a machine-readable history of peer evaluations and updates for preprints. This history can be used to discover work and help in formalising and recognising the scholarly contributions of community preprint peer evaluation initiatives.

UX Improvements to evaluation signals

As the PRC (Publish, Review, Curate) model of publication gains traction, we’re adapting Sciety’s user experience to better facilitate the outputs of the communities involved. We're placing greater emphasis on making reader-focused signals—such as curated recommendations—more prominent. These signals help readers quickly identify valuable preprints, guiding them to trusted and well-reviewed content. Here is a design direction that we are exploring:

💬 Your voice matters

We want to make community preprint evaluation a go to signal for knowing which papers to read and we can't do this without your input. We're especially interested in what you think about our design direction for PRC, so Book a 1:1 call to learn more about our latest changes and help us plan the future of equitable, open research outputs.

🔗 Stay connected

We’ll be back shortly with everything that's happening on Sciety.

Until then, you can find us on Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.