Craig Nicholson, News Editor, Research Europe

In an era of smartphones and social media, ‘influencers’ and ‘content curators’ wield enormous power over fields from fashion to music, shaping opinions via promoted news items, pictures and playlists.

Can the staid world of scholarly journals take any cues from these worlds, with their vast and sometimes shadowy networks of tastemakers?

Some think so. Rather than asking editors and peer reviewers to assess unpublished manuscripts, they want publishers and societies to trawl through outputs uploaded by researchers to preprint servers and choose from there.

(Published in Research Europe on 7 March 2019.) 

Read the full article on the Research Europe website here.