Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!
March 17, 2021

10 years of product failures, some personal stories

#product #scpb #failure #contechlive2020 Last year I presented a talk on some of the product failures that I have been involved in over the last 10 years. I just found the video of the session that I recorded, so I'm posting it here for your enjoyment. https://share.mmhmm.app/46e2c4aba3664511853a93b3823c3f12
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March 16, 2021

Primer.ai are an interesting company

#ai #literature #future #primer #scpb Primer.ai https://primer.ai/ are an interesting company. They use machine learning models to create workflows and tools to make text comprehensible at scale. As far as I was aware most of their revenue is coming from the non academic market, but there is clearly a sweet spot to be found in applying...
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March 16, 2021

The https://mobile.twitter.com/medrxivpreprint team are looking for stories on how the existence of a medical preprint server has made a difference to people. You can read more at this tweet: https://twitter.com/hmkyale/status/1371901637439201291?s=20 BMJ co-supports MedaRXiV, and there has been an explosion of papers coming through th...
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March 11, 2021

Reducing friction increases throughput.

#blogging #scpb #hey #friction Blogging this past week has been really fun. More fun than it’s been for some time. I’ve been blogging on and off in some form on blog platforms since 2006, and even played around with RSS and custom updates on my website back in the early 2000s, but there is always a friction. In the past few years I’ve ...
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March 10, 2021

why publishers should care about persistent identifiers (PIDs) ?

#PIDs #scpb #infrastructure #ORCID #DOIs We are doing a big piece of metadata standardisation work at BMJ - the name of the internal group is the Research Data Integrity Group. We are also looking at where our processes diverge across our journals, and are aiming to have metadata and process diverge only where it must, rather than wher...
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March 9, 2021

New "DARPA" style 300M fund for breakthrough biological science from Wellcome - Wellcome Leap

#funding #funders #scpb #research #darpa This just popped up on my radar - a new funding initiative spinning out of Wellcome - https://wellcomeleap.org/. I think this is interesting because it's following a trend from private funders to want to try to move the needle on fundamental research programs (e.g. CZI, Gates). I think one of th...
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March 8, 2021

Four inspirational women

#science #international-womens-day Today is international women's day. Here are four women that I find inspirational. Emilie du Chatelet (1706 - 1749) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émilie_du_Châtelet) was a Frech noble, and mathematician. I am sad that I only found out about her recently through this amazing episode of in our time (ht...
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March 7, 2021

How to think about technical innovation in a medium to large organisation.

#blog #todigest #scpb #strategy #innovation #engineering #design (I drafted this post when I was in my old role, but a lot of this carries forward to my new role too). I like shipping things, and I like working with teams to help them become more effective, but what if in the race to help us get faster I end up just adding a whole lot ...
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March 6, 2021

I’ve joined the advisory board of GetFTR

#access#GetFTR#scpb#publihsing A few weeks ago I was asked to join the advisory board for GetFTR https://www.getfulltextresearch.com/ I wrote up a long piece about this service when it came out, and I think I got my analysis mostly right - http://scholarly-comms-product-blog.com/2019/12/11/thoughts_on_getftr_/ I ended my post with the ...
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March 5, 2021

What’s up with peer review these days?

#socscifoo #peer-review #publishing #scpb A couple of weeks back I got invited to social science for camp - more on that later - but the topic of peer review came up. The question was - what are the best ongoing systems for making peer review a bester experience. It’s 2021, there’s got to be something, right? I wrote up the following v...
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March 4, 2021

The enduring and astonishing wonder of the universe

#astronomy #galaxies #childhood My eight year old son had a home schooling lesson this week about astrophysics. I used to be an astrophysicist, and it's kind of burnt into my identity. The school has a week of trying to teach the children about jobs and CVs and thinking about how they might "get a job in science" - rather than encourag...
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March 4, 2021

Yet another blogging platform

#blogging #toblog #scpb #frictionless I've just gotten access to the new blogging platform from Hey, and, well, why not take it for a spin? I've been tinkering with trying to get a frictionless blogging system setup for years now, and was on the verge of looking to deploy something in AWS using Hugo, connected to github via github acti...
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