Annotation progress from Hypothes.is

I've blogged before on the importance of annotation for scholarly communication and the hypothes.is effort to implement it. At the beginning of December Hypothesis made a major announcement:

On Tuesday, we announced a major new initiative to bring this vision to reality, supported by a coalition of over 40 of the world’s essential scholarly organizations, such as JSTOR, PLOS, arXiv, HathiTrust, Wiley and HighWire Press, who are linking arms to establish a new paradigm of open collaborative annotation across the world’s knowledge.

Below the fold, more details on this encouraging development.

More Is Not Better

Hugh Pickens at /. points me to Attention decay in science, providing yet more evidence that the way the journal publishers have abdicated their role as gatekeepers is causing problems for science. The abstract claims:

The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly. ... The decay is ... becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. However, when time is counted in terms of the number of published papers, the rate of decay of citations is fairly independent of the period considered. This indicates that the attention of scholars depends on the number of published items, and not on real time.

Below the fold, some thoughts.

Annotations

Caroline O'Donovan at the Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting article entitled Exegesis: How early adapters, innovative publishers, legacy media companies and more are pushing toward the annotated web. She discusses the way media sites including The New York Times, The Financial Times, Quartz and SoundCloud and platforms such as Medium are trying to evolve from comments to annotations as a way to improve engagement with their readers. She also describes the work hypothes.is is doing to build annotations into the Web infrastructure. There is also an interesting post on the hypothes.is blog from Peter Brantley on a workshop with journalists. Below the fold, some thoughts on the implications for preserving the Web.