The academic literature is growing at a tremendous pace, and so a number of tools have been released to try and help busy people sort the wheat from the chaff.  I wrote a few months ago about Meta, and before that Semantic Scholar, for instance, which uses algorithms to determine trends in the literature and highlight to users the issues that are generating significant attention from the academic world.

This is an obvious break from the approach taken by journals who use editorial judgement to provide us with the best research in their field.  The publisher Springer are attempting to take curation to another level however with an initiative called Change the World, One Article at a Time.

One article at a time

The project looks at the articles published in Springer journals throughout 2015 that have tackled some of the hottest topics in the world, whether that’s climate change, inequality or energy.

The project will make the articles selected open access until 15 July 2016, if they aren’t already, whilst granting permanent openness to those that were temporarily open previously.

The articles were chosen by the editors in chief at Springer, who were each asked to nominate a single article from their journal that addressed the biggest issues facing humanity.  The curated collection now consists of approximately 100 of the best articles from the past year.

“We live in times of unprecedented scientific, technical and medical advancement, yet we are faced with great global issues that threaten human welfare and our environment. We are gratified to receive feedback from so many journals which have published articles that have the potential to ‘change the world.’ Springer hopes to make a difference by supporting projects and authors who try to tackle these challenges,” Springer say.

With the global scientific community publishing ever more research, it seems inevitable that curation will play a growing role in helping us digest and make sense of this research.  Whether this is automated, as with Meta, or curated as with Springer remains to be seen.

Do check out the site however and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.