Weekly digest: innovations in open science

Tim Ellison

Featuring Vivli, a novel global clinical trial data sharing platform, MedArXiv, the preprint server for medicine, the BMJ’s new open access journal and the peer review distribution index.

Vivli receives funding to build the first data-sharing platform for global clinical trials via Business Wire

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation has contributed US$2 million to Vivli, a Massachusetts-based not-for-profit organization, to support the launch of its platform for sharing global clinical trial data from 2018 onward.

MedArXiv, the new preprint server for medicine and health sciences via The Publication Plan

MedArXiv will soon be launched and aims to improve the openness and dissemination of medical research.

The BMJ launches BMJ Open Science via BMJ

In this video Dr Emily Sena introduces BMJ Open Science, the new journal for publication of open access preclinical and basic medical research, of which she is Editor-in-Chief.

Estimated effects of implementing an open access policy for grantees at a private foundation via PeerJ

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation recently discovered that 99.3% of articles published by its grantees could have been published open access within 12 months of publication; 91.7% could have been published open access immediately upon publication. Partly based on this research, the Foundation has implemented a policy mandating that grantees should publish their articles open access within 12 months of publication.

Introducing the Review Distribution Index for peer review analyses via Publons

The Review Distribution Index was developed to help shed light on the spread of the global reviewing workload. Publons has used the index to analyse the peer reviews performed in 2015; the analysis revealed that, in each of the included countries, a small proportion of reviewers (10–20%) were responsible for writing half of the reviews.

Crossref will assign DOIs to peer review-related content via The Publication Plan

From this month onward, Crossref, an organization that interlinks a variety of online research content by using DOIs, will extend its service to include referee reports, decision letters and author responses, as well as post-publication reviews.

Publishers step up the fight against ResearchGate via Times Higher Education

Elsevier and the American Chemical Society are suing ResearchGate, an academic social network that enables exchange of scientific articles. According to the publishers, up to 40% of the scientific articles on ResearchGate are copyrighted and should be removed.