Advancements in open access publishing

Here at CiteAb we’ve been following the open access movement and changes in open access publishing, so we were excited to see eLife introduce ‘eLife Labs’ earlier this month.

eLife Labs aims to make progression in open access publishing evidence-based and crowd-sourced.

eLife explained: “We aim to improve our services to researchers on an ongoing basis. Sometimes that calls for large changes to how things are done such as our take on peer review, but often it calls for iterative modifications to our existing services, or to exploring speculative ideas that may bear fruit months or years later.

Elifelabs1

“A critical component in deciding what to change, and where to place our efforts, is in getting feedback on these ideas from the community, and also having a place to simply test out features of functionality.”

The new platform, eLife Labs aims to offer this space to test new features and allow users to give their feedback or make suggestions.

Andrew, our founder, said: “eLife plan to use eLife Labs to put small scale experiments online, often very rough sketches of ideas, and using these to gather feedback from users.

“We all are very aware of the large amount of time developing new web products and services can take, so this approach should save a great deal of time, allow eLife to select the most promising projects to take forward to full development, and ultimately result in faster advancements in the field of open access publishing. Here at CiteAb we’re excited to see how the project progresses!”

One of the first projects to be released through eLife Labs is an experimental eLife Lens search page. To find out more about eLife Labs see http://elifesciences.org/labs. Let us know what you think of the idea, and whether you’ve seen any other publishers open source ideas and feedback on their development in this way.

– David and the CiteAb team

 

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