reviz.in – peer-review annotations with hypothes.is
in Research / Science on Journals, Peer-review, Publishing, Research, Science, Software
A few months ago I was flooded with review requests. And I figured that it might be time to look around for solutions and code something up allow me to annotate peer-review PDFs easily, and generate a review report with a click of a button (as proposed years ago).
Enter, Hypothes.is. A few years ago this initiative started to facilitate the semantic or annotated web. A way to annotate web pages separate from the original creator. Hypothes.is did exactly what I needed to annotate any given PDF (also locally stored items). However, I could not extract the data easily in a standardized way. In addition, the standard mode for the Hypothes.is client is a public one, with personal groups being private. In short, although the whole framework had all the pieces the output wasn’t optimal for peer-review, if not dangerous to reputations when accidentally leaking reviews to the web.
As such, I created Reviz.in, a simple hack of the original Hypothes.is client and Google Chrome extension which makes sure you can’t escape the group which holds your peer-review revision notes and generates a nice review report (see image below). In addition, I added a fancy icon and renamed the original labels (not consistently however), to differentiate the original interface from my copy to avoid confusion. I hope over time this functionality will be provided by the original Hypothes.is client, in the mean time you can read more on the installation process on the Reviz.in website:
or download
I hope this simple hack will help people speed up their review process as to free up some time. I also hope that publishers will take note, as the lack of their innovation on this front is rather shameful.
