Sciety product news 15/01/2024

Sciety now surfaces even more of the evaluated preprint journey.

a year ago   •   2 min read

By Mark Williams

The latest in preprint innovations from sciety.org, the home of public preprint evaluation.

🚀 What's new?

  • We are now able to surface more expressions of the paper including links to Reviewed Preprints on eLife's EPP platform. Here is an example of an article published to Research Square that has then gone on to receive reviews and been curated by eLife and here is an example of a BioRxiv article that has seen multiple group peer review and multiple version publication
  • As we've added more of the paper's review history to the feed, we've found that version numbers do not scale or map well across all the places people publish preprints. For example different 'preprint servers' (to include for example BioRxiv and eLife's Reviewed Preprint platform) start publishing at new version numbers, so when we developed the new functionality we had an article page that read 'Version 1 published to BioRxiv... Version 2 published to BioRxiv... Version 1 published to eLife etc' which is confusing for the reader. Our architecture was also fetching the Version number from the URL, which isn't scalable because not everyone adds version numbers to the URL, so you'd get stuff like 'Version 9' because the DOI ended in a 9.

    Another issue is that there is no machine readable standard on Crossref to get the version number eg. no property called "version" or a standard for publishers to input this data. So we're trying to be agnostic on Sciety, but also make it understandable to readers.

    As such, we've decided to remove version numbers from a paper's activity feed. The paper activity feed concentrates on telling people that something has changed, where to find out more about that change and where possible what that change is; eg. a new review or curation statement.

🔭 What's next?

  • We'll continue to deliver the value of showcasing even more of the preprint journey.
  • We'll be exploring how groups can have more autonomy over their list curation
  • We'll be updating our blog to show how Sciety can be useful to a variety of audiences.

💡 Let us know what you think

We're curious to learn what researchers think about the paper activity feed. Please fill out our one question survey to share your thoughts.

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