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Working in open-access institutions with a large majority of underserved populations, community college instructors often face the twofold tasks of helping students become conversant in discipline-specific coursework and also bringing students up-to-speed in their academic skill sets. Between publishers' higher costs of textbooks and students' struggle with large amounts of reading materials, getting students to both access and engage more deeply with texts is a challenge. Using annotation tools that leverage 21st-century technology to bring social reading back to its traditional roots, instructors can help their students develop critical thinking, digital literacy, and collaboration skills.

This white paper has been elaborated by the Tools (R&D) Working Group, one of the 7 Working Groups launched by the OPERAS research infrastructure. The Working Group goal was to set up a list of tools and development which need to be done, to improve their usability for the OPERAS partners. The approach in OPERAS emphasizes the importance of building the open science scholarly communication infrastructure in Social Sciences and Humanities on community driven tools. In this perspective, the development of Open Source tools and the setup of a toolbox appear to be appropriate answers to the existing needs and evolutions in scholarly publishing.

Il est évident que si l’on souhaite mettre en oeuvre une activité de veille collaborative, et plus spécifiquement d’analyse de l’information captée par celle-ci, il faut disposer d’outils susceptibles d’y aider. Diigo ou Hypothes.is permettent de sélectionner et éventuellement de partager les éléments importants de nos lectures et peuvent de ce fait devenir de véritables outils d’aide à l’analyse.

One example of multifaceted and multi-stakeholder partnership can be seen in a project I’ve helped to coordinate over the past few years called the Marginal Syllabus. The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversations with educators about equity in education via open and collaborative web annotation. Our initial commitment to author partnerships has grown to include active partnering with both publishers of academic content (so as to encourage openly accessible scholarly conversation), as well as with organizations like Hypothesis and the National Writing Project (who provide technical and facilitation supports). Collectively, these partnerships support K-12 educators and university faculty as they use open source technology and openly access texts that spark collaborative conversations about educational equity.

Earlier this year, we launched the annotation and commenting tool, Hypothesis, on eLife to allow users to make notes on all content, including research articles, commentaries, magazine articles and blog posts. A couple of months on, and we are already seeing different ways in which the tool is being used for holding scientific conversations online.

Elsevier, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, hasn’t been shy about shifting away from just publishing to offering a set of tools for scholars to use throughout the research process. Last week the company took another step along that path by announcing a partnership with a nonprofit named Hypothesis, which makes annotation software that lets readers make margin notes on online articles.

Elsevier and Hypothesis have announced a collaboration to align annotation capabilities in Elsevier’s Research Products with the emerging ecosystem of interoperable clients and services for annotation based on open standards and technologies. By working together, Elsevier and Hypothesis say they are demonstrating two important shifts in scholarly communications: first, the growing role that annotation plays within the life cycle of research and publication; and second, that data standards and open frameworks are increasingly essential to scientific collaboration and progress.

The next time you feel moved to comment on an article in the open-access online journal eLife, be prepared for a different user experience. On 31 January, eLife announced it had adopted the open-source annotation service, Hypothesis, replacing its traditional commenting system. That’s the result of a year-long effort between the two services to make Hypothesis more amenable to the scholarly publishing community.

THE EARTH IS 15 YEARS AWAY from a “mini ice age” “that will cause bitterly cold winters during which rivers such as the Thames freeze over.” That was the claim that kicked off an article in The Telegraph in July 2015.

Now, I will be the first to admit that the writing published in scholarly journals often suffers from overuse of jargon and density of language that can render it of little use to educators — that’s a topic for another post. But, for those of us whose careers depend upon publishing in these journals AND are striving to write in clear and relevant ways for multiple audiences, it is frustrating to feel that we are giving a monologue that may be heard only by a few other scholars. This is why I’m so grateful for the experience of having an article that I co-wrote with friend and colleague, Antero Garcia, publicly available on the web annotation platform, Hypothesis, through a partnership between the National Writing Project (NWP) and Marginal Syllabus.