Knowable Magazine

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  Posted by Beth Evans on April 30, 2020 at 4:49 pm

  LJ published an article on new magazines.

  They include Knowable Magazine

  “What is known? What isn’t known? Knowable Magazine, the digital publication from Annual Reviews, seeks to make that knowledge accessible to all. Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens. We report on the current state of play across a wide variety of fields — from agriculture to high-energy physics; biochemistry to water security; the origins of the universe to psychology.”

  They have a donation link on their website that says: “Please help us make scientific knowledge accessible to all.”

  You may know the magazine already from the web site.  As LJ says: “The publisher embraces the open science movement, and the magazine is its attempt to bring current scientific knowledge and its broader relevance to the general reader.”

  It is interesting to think about “open” being in part about accessibility of language and not just about a paywall, but after hearing Andrea Liu last week at the Future of Open forum from the GC, I feel like I should be skeptical about what Annual Reviews is doing.  Megan Wacha may advice that it’s just one more example of an organization looking to gather data!

  Does anyone remember the name of a service that was trolling academics about a year ago through email offering, for a fee, a platform for their publications with articles written about their scholarly publications in lay language?   This is bugging me.  If you remember something like that, I’d love to know what the service was.

  Thanks.

  Beth

   

• Megan Wacha (they/them)

  Member

  April 30, 2020 at 4:57 pm

  Hi Beth,

  Thank you for bringing this to our attention! What a difficult time to launch a new publication, but it looks like an interesting one. I always appreciate when publicly accessible research is put into publicly accessible language, as happens when journalists (or communications offices) pick-up open access research from faculty.

  Very best,

  Meg

  P.S. While everyone has at least one foot in the data game, I don’t believe it’s a revenue stream for Annual Reviews. 🙂

   
  Beth Evans

  Participant

  April 30, 2020 at 5:03 pm

  🙂
  Jill Cirasella (she/her)

  Member

  May 15, 2020 at 1:05 pm

  Beth, is the service you were trying to think of a few weeks ago Research Outreach (https://researchoutreach.org/)? They’re an operation that charges researchers for the creation of lay-language versions of their articles…turning them almost into press releases.
  Beth Evans

  Participant

  May 15, 2020 at 2:12 pm

  Yes! That’s it.  Thank you, Jill.  How did you find it? I sort of remember getting mail about it but couldn’t find anything in my old email.
  Jill Cirasella (she/her)

  Member

  May 15, 2020 at 2:14 pm

  It’s wasn’t remarkable powers of memory — somebody just asked me about it recently!