My good friend John Perry Barlow passed yesterday. John Perry, together with Gerry Percy, was Hypothesis’ founding (and till yesterday, active) board member. From the very beginning, he understood and believed in what we were trying to do, at a time when essentially no one else did. I loved him dearly, as did so many [...]
Hypothesis and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory announce the selection of Hypothesis as the primary annotation mechanism for the bioRxiv preprint service.
Originally published 12 May 2017 on the QDR blog by Sebastian Karcher. Scholars are increasingly being called on – by journal editors, funders, and each other – to “show their work.” Social science is only fully understandable and evaluable if researchers share the data and analysis that underpin their conclusions. Making qualitative social science transparent [...]
Hypothesis is proud to show its support as a primary stakeholder for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), an effort just announced to lead the scholarly industry towards opening the citation information in all publications. The essence of the argument is that while the text of the article itself might be closed access, the bibliography [...]
Today we are announcing a partnership to bring open, collaborative, cross-platform annotation to eBooks. Together with NYU Libraries, NYU Press, Evident Point, the Readium Foundation and the EPUBjs project, Hypothesis will be working to bring annotation to EPUB, the standard format for digital books. Digital books represent an enormous class of content which at present cannot be collaboratively annotated with others. Combined with the recent work that the W3C has done to standardize annotation, this represents an essential next step in bringing a high quality open annotation implementation to books everywhere.
Many have tried over the years to bring us web annotations. The lack of standards has been one of the key things holding these efforts back-- a need we highlighted in the first of our 12 original principles back in 2013 and have been working towards ever since. Yesterday, on February 23, things took a giant leap forward when the W3C, the standards body for the Web, standardized annotation. Twenty four years after Marc Andreessen first built collaborative annotation into Mosaic and tested it on a few “guinea pigs” before turning it off, annotations have finally become first-class citizens of the web.
Yesterday, the scholarly communication + AI startup Meta signed an agreement to be acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Aside from the initial news a few weeks ago and Joe Esposito’s article in the Scholarly Kitchen, I’ve seen few people remark on it. But it’s a big deal. A serious piece of scholarly infrastructure is being made open, free and effectively non-profit. Meta has built a cutting edge system to mine scholarly papers new and old, and allow the data to be employed in diverse ways–predicting discoveries before they’re made, projecting the future impact of papers just hours old, and unlocking the potential for innumerable applications applying computation at scale across scientific literature. In what must have taken extraordinary patience, persistence and a lot of finesse, they managed to secure access to some of the most strategic closed content in the scholarly world.
We're thrilled to announce our first customer today, eLife -- an open access life sciences journal. The press release announcing our partnership is attached below. eLife partners with Hypothes.is to advance open scholarly annotation Wednesday, September 14, 2016 eLife, a non-profit initiative inspired by research funders and led by scientists, is working with Hypothes.is to bring [...]
UPDATE (2016-05-24) "Involving page owners in annotation". Recent events (here, here, and here) have prompted us to rethink how the technology we are building can be used not only to discuss and enlighten, but also to harass and abuse. Here's the heart of the matter: most web annotation systems, ours included, don't currently provide adequate [...]
Today we’re announcing a coalition of over 40 scholarly publishers, platforms, libraries and technology partners that share the goal of building an open conversation layer over all knowledge. Over the next several years this coalition will be working together to define, design and implement a common framework for scholarly collaboration from peer-review through post-publication discussion, [...]