This is just a quick post of appreciation for PCI Registered Reports. I’ve recently joined the PCI RR community as a ‘recommender’. One thing that spurred me to join is a rather unsatisfactory experience I had as a peer-reviewer, reviewing a manuscript where the experimental design was deeply insufficient.

In 2017, we have a vast toolbox of informative methods to help us analyse large volumes of text. Sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and named entity recognition are to name but a few of these exciting approaches. Computational power and storage capacity are not the limiting factors on what we could do with the 100 million or so journal articles that comprise the ever-growing research literature so far.

Today (2015-09-01), marks the public announcement of Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO for short), a new open access journal for all disciplines that seeks to open-up the entire research cycle with some truly novel features I know what you might be thinking: *Another open access journal? Really? * Myself, nor Daniel Mietchen simply wouldn’t be involved with this project if it was just another boring open access journal.

Wiley & Readcube have done something rather sneaky recently, and it’s not escaped the attention of diligent readers of the scientific literature. On the article landing page for some, if not all(?) journal articles at Wiley, in JavaScript enabled web browsers they’ve replaced all links to download the PDF file of the article with links that direct you to Readcube instead.

So, apparently Elsevier are launching a new open access mega-journal some time this year, joining the bandwagon of similar efforts from almost every other major publisher. A lovely acknowledgement of the roaring success of PLOS ONE, who did it first a long time ago. They’re only ~8 years behind, but they’re learning. I for one am pleased they are asking the research community what they want from this new journal.

I’ve just given an email interview for Abby Clobridge, for a forthcoming short column in Online Searcher. I give many of these interviews and often very little material from it gets used, so I asked Abby if it was okay if I reposted what I wrote. Her response: “go for it” – thanks Abby! So here’s my thoughts on Generation Open, for a readership of librarians and information professionals: