Though we’re releasing new features this Friday, we’ve already been busy working on the next set of improvements to the platforms. We’re very excited to announce the brand-new slate of features for Digital Commons and SelectedWorks.
What’s coming, at a glance:
On-demand global readership
This is a true story: a library director was showing the readership download map to her provost and at precisely that moment the map showed a reader from Iceland downloading one of the provost’s papers. As you might imagine, it was a most successful meeting. Was it Serendipity? Nope. It is a new program we’ve been piloting called “on-demand global readership.” Through various hub networks across 384 countries and 104,012 cities around the world, you can request a real human reader who will download any article of your choice, at a time you set in advance. Need to impress a dean? Sending your liaison librarian to present to an especially tough department? We’re excited to imagine how you will use this creative new tool.
Mega-blind peer-review
Authors often worry about the anonymity of peer-review, and the risk that rivals and enemies they made at the last conference will end up reviewing and rejecting their paper. They want journals to do better than simple double-blind peer-review. With bepress’s new mega-blind peer-review, your editors will soon have the opportunity to completely anonymize the editorial process through a mega-database of reviewers. Journals will automatically distribute new submissions randomly to any of the thousands of reviewers who have completed reviews for any other journal hosted on Digital Commons. All identifying information such as article topic, editor name, contact information, journal name, and article content, will be withheld. The time has finally come for your authors to feel secure that personal knowledge has been completely eliminated from the peer review process.
SelectedWorks integration with new social media tools
Faculty want one central place to showcase all their downloads, ratings, and impact. We are pleased to bring SelectedWorks even further into modern social networking with an array of new third-party integrations. SelectedWorks profiles will now include feeds from authors’ Facebook pages, Spotify playlists, and Amazon wishlists. For the single scholar, we’ve also worked with developers at OKCupid to enable authors’ dating profiles to be seen alongside their research, showcasing extracurricular interests as well as scholarly achievements. We have also integrated the well-regarded “chili pepper” rating system from the popular “Rate my Professors” site, sure to be a hot new feature with professors from departments across campus.
Copyright compliance
Are your faculty flaunting their responsibility to deposit a copy of their research in the IR? Have you invested years getting an open access mandate passed, but still you get no compliance from your faculty? The problem is that your mandate lacks “teeth.” After careful research, our Outreach and Scholarly Communications team has concluded that compliance requires going that extra mile. Let us help you. We’ve got a new service provider who excels at “making offers that can’t be refused,” and together we’ve taken Sherpa/Romeo enforcement in a more hands-on direction. If you’d like to pilot this new service, which we call Sherpa/Gotti, contact outreach@bepress.com and ask for Mike or Al.
New creative common license: CC-NAEE
Creative Commons is a wonderful set of licenses, but based on conversations with faculty and graduate advisers, we’ve recognized a growing need for a new kind of creative common license. It’s called CC: NAEE (Never Available Ever Ever). Any work with this license will be unavailable and unusable in perpetuity. This license will help libraries reach out to departments like English, creative writing, and history, and find new ways not to disseminate their works. This may also be applicable to other types of content like “student work that we’re just not sure about,” “research data that someone might steal,” and the well-known sensitive area of “papers that someone might plagiarize.”
Happy April Fool’s from bepress!!!
