ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and World Scientific Publishing, a leading international independent publisher of books and journals, today announced a new partnership to grow readership and authorship, as well as enhance engagement between readers and authors through the ResearchGate platform. 

All new and archive content from nine World Scientific journals will be made accessible on ResearchGate, covering 32,000 full-text version of record articles. The journals, including both fully open access and hybrid titles, are International Journal of Modern Physics B, International Journal of Structural Stability and Dynamics, International Journal of Modern Physics A, Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, Journal of Advanced Dielectrics, International Journal of Innovation Management, International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, Journal of Information & Knowledge Management, International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. The initiative will drive increased usage and authorship by removing access barriers and enabling researchers to discover new, relevant content and journals within their network.

Authors of the articles included in this partnership will gain further benefits, with content automatically added to their publication pages on ResearchGate. This gives authors a unique opportunity to connect with their readers, as well as providing them with statistics showcasing the impact of their work.

“We are pleased to be working with ResearchGate to foster connections between our authors and readers, and to increase the visibility of our journals,” said Max Phua, Managing Director at World Scientific. “We see particular benefits for entitled users from the partnership, making it easier to access the full-text of content they subscribe to directly on ResearchGate.”

“We are thrilled to embark on this new partnership which aligns with World Scientific’s goal of disseminating research to as wide an audience as possible, said Sören Hofmayer, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at ResearchGate. “The ResearchGate community comprises some 25 million engaged researchers from diverse disciplines around the world. This collaboration will facilitate a new way to enhance the services for World Scientific authors, and improve the overall experience for readers.”

For more information about ResearchGate, please visit www.researchgate.net. 

For more information about World Scientific, please visit www.worldscientific.com.

African research is receiving a major visibility boost with the indexing of 10 national funders in Dimensions, the world’s largest linked research database.

This project is a collaboration with Digital Science, the Africa PID Alliance (APA), the Association of African Universities (AAU), the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), and the Research Organization Registry (ROR).

“This project connects the research outputs from leading African funding bodies to the global research ecosystem,” said Joy Owango, Executive Director of TCC Africa and Project Lead at the Africa PID Alliance.

“Indexing and linking their data in Dimensions allows these African national funders to increase transparency around their research investments, demonstrate the impacts and outcomes of funded projects, facilitate new regional and global collaborations, inform strategic funding priorities through insights on research trends, and amplify Africa’s overall research contributions on the international stage,” she said.

Digital Science CEO Dr Daniel Hook said: “We’re excited to be able to partner with research organizations in Africa, and to help drive improved visibility of African research both to Africans and around the world. As Africa increases its investment in research, it is critical to ensure that its funding is routed to the most impactful projects that make a difference for Africans; and for Africa to showcase its research insights in a global context.

“Digital Science’s Dimensions will help researchers and decision-makers across the continent to garner deep, strategic insights into research – such as areas of strength or areas of opportunity in collaborations, expertise, and resourcing. We hope this collaboration can form part of the foundation for a stronger research ecosystem across Africa that will lead to global recognition of Africa’s unique research proposition,” he said.

“The continent has few science repositories and data there are rarely openly shared. We are, however, moving in a new direction that now opens doors for more research collaboration and increase the sharing of data, thereby promoting trust among researchers … as well as availing data to policy makers to use in making important decisions in government,” said Professor Olusola Bandele Oyewole, Secretary-General of the AAU. He urged African researchers not to fear sharing data so long as this is done in a responsible manner.  

Director Government and Funders – Middle East & Africa at Digital Science, Amna Babiker, said: “Africa’s research landscape has been undergoing rapid change, with many nations recognizing the importance of research to their future economic, cultural and societal prosperity. It’s been a pleasure working with our many partners in Africa to understand what role Digital Science can play in helping African research institutions to reach their potential, and for their voices to be heard within global research.”

The SGCI is a multilateral initiative aimed at strengthening the institutional capacities of 17 public science funding agencies across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, until now, little was known globally about the research investments and outputs from most of these key funders, except for South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF), which was already indexed.

“This lack of visibility has hindered efforts to comprehensively understand, evaluate and build upon African nations’ critical investments into advancing knowledge – something we now hope to turn around,” Ms Owango said.

ROR Director Maria Gould said: “One of the key use cases for ROR is helping funders track the research outputs they have supported, and this is especially critical to raise the visibility of research activities across the African continent. We are happy that ROR can support this effort.”

The SGCI funders now globally accessible in Dimensions are:

• National Research Fund (Kenya)
• National Commission For Science, Technology & Innovation (Kenya)
• Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology
• Uganda National Council for Science and Technology
• Malawi National Commission for Science and Technology
• Fundo Nacional de Investigacao (Mozambique)
• Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) (Nigeria)
• National Science and Technology Council (Zambia)
• Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (Ghana)

Efforts are underway to index the remaining seven councils to fully capture funding across the 16 SGCI participating nations. 

In the long-term, indexing the SGCI funders lays the groundwork for more effective research management, evidence-based policy-making, and amplifying the impacts of African research outputs globally.

AskAdis will provide more immediate and relevant answers to drug development and research questions as draws on exclusive validated information

AskAdis is a new cutting-edge conversational chat interface developed by Springer Nature for the pharmaceutical drug development market using its AdisInsight , a market-leading drug development intelligence database with over half a million users annually. 

Off-the-shelf LLMs (large language models) are often inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable as they draw on all the content on which they have been trained to generate answers. Using Generative AI, AskAdis has been trained on only relevant already validated content, information and data making results more accurate and reliable.  

It has a natural language conversational chat interface which allows users to ask specific questions. This means users can refine the exact scope of information they are looking for in the shortest possible time – an essential feature for the pharma industry where information can rapidly change, is highly complex and can impact human life.

Commenting Harald Wirsching, Managing Director, Data and Analytics Solutions, said:

“Companies and researchers in the drug development space face a specific challenge – how to get targeted, relevant and reliable answers to specific questions.  AskAdis addresses this challenge and provides unparalleled access to critical, trusted  information which has all already been validated. Using AI in this way we are able to accelerate discovery by driving more informed decisions and fostering accelerated drug development.”

Following the acquisition of protocols.io in 2023, Springer Nature has today announced the migration of all protocols currently hosted on Protocols Exchange to the innovative platform, making protocols.io the home for the  publishers’  fully open protocols. Springer Nature hosts the world’s largest collection of protocols of biomedical and life sciences protocols covering over 155,000  protocols & methods. 

The transition enables authors to benefit from greater functionality and the dynamic offerings of a more collaborative platform, helping them to share, develop, and make their methods open in ways not possible with traditional platforms.

As a result of the transition to protocols.io, the publishers’ Protocols Exchange platform will be closed for new  submissions by the end of Q3 2024. All protocols on the platform will be transferred to protocols.io. Alongside protocols.io, researchers choosing to publish with Springer Nature, will  still have the option to publish their protocols/methods in  peer-reviewed publications (searchable via Springer Nature Experiments). 

Speaking of the content migration and protocols offering, Harsh Jegadeesan, Chief Publishing Officer Springer Nature said:

 “Researchers have high expectations of the services and functionality that platforms should offer them, ensuring they can focus their time on where it is best spent – on the research. Traditional protocols and methods workflows typically do not enable dynamic sharing, collaboration and interaction, which can limit the ways in which research can then be reused and built upon. We are incredibly proud of what we were able to build with Protocols Exchange, laying the foundation for the sharing of scientific methods. This transition  means that we continue to offer our community the best in product support, as well as simplified workflows to enable easy sharing and ensure research impact beyond academia – helping find solutions to our world’s greatest challenges.”

Lenny Teytelman, President and founder of protocols.io added:

“In a sense, Nature created the first preprint server for protocols in 2006 with the launch of Protocols Network (which became Protocol Exchange in 2010). When the team and I started protocols.io in 2014, we saw our effort as an extension of the Protocol Exchange mission. This new phase feels like a 

particularly meaningful and natural step in combining our forces and vision for a more open and reproducible research environment. One that would not be possible for protocols.io or Protocol Exchange individually.”

More on Springer Nature’s commitment to open research can be read here.

Increased instances of fraudulent research are affecting the academic publishing community. Following successful pilots, Springer Nature is rolling out two new bespoke AI tools to support the identification of papers that contain AI-generated fake content and / or problematic images – two indicators of research integrity issues.

Developed with Slimmer AI Science division, which Springer Nature acquired in 2023, one tool, Geppetto, detects AI-generated content, a classic indication of paper mill activity.

Geppetto works by dividing the paper up into sections and uses its own algorithms to check the consistency of the text in each section. The sections are then given a score based on the probability that the text in them has been AI generated. The higher the score, the greater the probability of there being problems, initiating a human check by Springer Nature staff.  Geppetto is already responsible for identifying hundreds of fake papers soon after submission, preventing them from being published – and from taking up editors’ and peer reviewers’ valuable time.

SnappShot, also developed in-house, is an AI-assisted image integrity analysis tool. Currently used to analyse PDF files containing gel and blot images and look for duplications in those image types – another known integrity problem within the industry – this will be expanded to cover additional image types and integrity problems and speed up checks on papers.

As with Geppetto, SnappShot does not make the decision on whether a submission should progress through to the next stage of the editorial process but provides a signal as to whether human assessment of the images is needed. The tool not only helps to avoid publishing duplicated or manipulated data, but also supports good feedback for authors on their figures, for example where figures have been inadvertently duplicated, encouraging higher standards of research practice and data management.

Commenting, Chris Graf, Research Integrity Director at Springer Nature, said:

“The publishing industry faces a determined, malicious threat from paper mills or bad actors who submit fake papers containing fabricated data and we are determined that this content will not get through our systems. These attempts can have serious consequences for trust in science and investigating and resolving them can take up an enormous amount of time and resources.

“Our new tools, which we are constantly improving, are helping us to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters and ensure that the research we published is robust and can be trusted to be used and built on.” If you are facing fraud charges, a knowledgeable attorney can make all the difference in your case. Having legal representation with a deep understanding of internet crimes, like https://www.newjerseycriminallawattorney.com/white-collar-crime/internet-crime/, ensures that you have someone who can navigate the legal complexities on your behalf.

These AI tools are two of a number currently being developed in-house as part of Springer Nature’s ongoing commitment to ensuring the integrity of the content it publishes, which includes investment in a rapidly growing, expert team and extensive technology development. Springer Nature is also committed to ongoing collaborative work with the wider publishing community as a contributing organisation in the STM Integrity Hub, which facilitates knowledge and data exchange and develops shared technology tools. Use ai photography tools if you need to generate new photos or modify existing photos in your project.

CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, announced its collaboration with key industry stakeholders to launch the Leiden Institute for FAIR and Equitable Science (LIFES). In recognition of the challenges that exist with data reuse within the global research community, LIFES is a joint effort by an international public-private partnership of eleven academic and private organizations to build a wide and diverse network of public and private members that want to incorporate FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and equitable data reuse within their organizations.

Along with CCC, the founding partners of LIFES include the GO FAIR Foundation, FAIRscholar, HINQ, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Roche Nederland B.V., Sage, TNO, and the University of Twente(UT). 

With the creation of this ecosystem, LIFES will facilitate access to FAIR-compliant applications and services that support efficient data sharing, improve research reproducibility, and enhance collaboration across different domains and disciplines. LIFES will foster collaborations to bridge the deficiencies in current technical capabilities and research methodologies that present unnecessary barriers to equitable data visiting. It will also take the lead in securing public and private funding for developing strategic capabilities.

By laying the foundation for a FAIR and equitable data ecosystem that can be replicated throughout the world, LIFES is responding to the immediate needs of the global research community and meeting the growing demand for solutions that address the evolving challenges of a world that increasingly relies on data-driven decision-making. 

“Data accessibility is becoming increasingly central to research, and a quantifiable sense of data reproducibility is crucial for research-intensive organizations, especially in this era of generative AI,” said Babis Marmanis, Executive Vice President and CTO, CCC. “The mission of LIFES is to advance scientific research and innovation, which is important to CCC, our partners, and customers. Datasets that follow the FAIR data principles can spur innovation, promote inclusivity, and support sustainability.”

As more organizations adopt machine learning and AI, FAIR data becomes vital to enabling the use of data for machines. These principles emphasize machine-actionability, enabling AI systems to access an increasing volume and complexity of data automatically, at scale. The interoperability aspect of FAIR data also ensures appropriate semantic mapping of metadata to enhance the discovery, retrieval, usability, and analysis of data for legitimate research questions that meet legal, ethical, and consent requirements.

Founded in 1978, CCC provides copyright licensing solutions, information services, and software solutions. CCC is committed to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive (DEI) workplace. CCC’s DEI Employee Resource Group launched a pilot Girls Who Code team at the elementary school level in 2023 and piloted the first chapter north of Boston last year. CCC is a member of the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC), whose mission is to accelerate innovation, growth, and development of an inclusive tech ecosystem in Massachusetts, and is also a member of the North Shore Juneteenth Association, an emerging 501(c)(3) organization of community leaders creating awareness about Juneteenth, educating the community about positive aspects of Black American culture, and dismantling racism by using events and programming as tools of change.

To learn more about CCC and FAIR data, visit CCC’s resource library: https://www.copyright.com/tag/fair-data/.