June 12, 2019 – Mount Laurel, NJ – At the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) 41st Annual Meeting held on May 29-31, in San Diego, CA, Paper Digest was awarded a People’s Choice Award for their artificial intelligence (AI) tool for scholarly communications during the SSP Previews Session, New and Noteworthy Product Presentations.
Pictured from left, David Myers, Dr. Cristian Mejia, Nobuko Miyairi, Dr. Yasutomo Takano, and SSP President, Adrian Stanley
This “lightning-round” plenary offered the chance to learn more about the industry’s newest and most innovative products, platforms, and/or content in 5-minute, back-to-back presentations. Attendees left with exposure to a wide breadth of content on new and updated products of interest to the scholarly publishing community. After the 13 presentations, attendees were asked to vote via the mobile meeting app for the product, platform, service, or content that would likely have the most positive impact in scholarly communications.
In his presentation, Paper Digest co-founder, Dr. Yasutomo Takano demonstrated how Paper Digest uses AI to generate an automatic summary of an open-access research paper. The user provides a DOI (digital object identifier), or the url to a PDF file, then Paper Digest will return a bulleted summary of the paper. The tool allows researchers to quickly grasp the core ideas of a paper, reducing reading time and supporting researchers where is English is a second language.
Paper Digest is the brainchild of two graduates from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who specialize in bibliometrics. Dr. Yasutomo Takano and Dr. Cristian Mejia, who are joined by strategic adviser, Ms. Nobuko Miyairi. In October 2018, Paper Digest received a Catalyst Grant from Digital Science.
Dr. Takano explained that as the number of journal articles doubles every nine years, with 3.5 million papers published alone in 2017, research shows that a substantial percentage are never read. An average US faculty reads only 20.66 papers per month, spending 32 minutes. For young researchers and those whose primary language is not English that time is extended significantly. Paper Digest aims to enable users to understand more content in less time, producing a single-page summary that can be read in under three minutes.
Paper Digest received an engraved People’s Choice award in recognition of their product innovation.
“This year we received over 45 submissions for the Previews Session. The committee selected the top 13 proposals to participate in the session at the meeting based on four criteria, each rated on a five-point scale, which ensures that only the most innovative and novel presentations are included.” said David Myers, session organizer.
“An interactive voting element thought the mobile app engages the audience and creates a bit of competition between the presenting organizations,” said Melanie Dolechek, SSP Executive Director.
Other presenting organizations this year included: American Society of Plant Biologists, Copyright Clearance Center, Editage/Cactus Communications, Exeter Premedia Services, Kudos, LibLynx, Molecular Connections, Morressier, Research Square, Ripeta, SciScore, and SelfStudy.
About the Society for Scholarly Publishing – SSP, founded in 1978, is a nonprofit organization formed to promote and advance communication among all sectors of the scholarly publication community through networking, information dissemination, and facilitation of new developments in the field. SSP members represent all aspects of scholarly publishing—including publishers, printers, e-products developers, technical service providers, librarians, and editors. SSP members come from a wide range of large and small commercial and nonprofit organizations. They meet at SSP’s annual meetings, educational seminars, and regional events to hear the latest trends from respected colleagues and to discuss common and mutual (and sometimes divergent) goals and viewpoints.
For more information, contact:
Melanie Dolechek, Executive Director
info@sspnet.org | 856-439-1385
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