Say Hello to Anno : Hypothesis | 18 Aug 2022

“It’s been 11 years since we launched Hypothesis. It’s gone by so fast. During this time, we’ve accomplished many things: We defined a vision for open web annotation, we built an open source framework to implement it, we helped form and lead the working group that shipped the W3C standard, and we launched a service that’s now used by over a million people around the world who have made nearly 40 million annotations. In higher education, more than 1,200 colleges and universities use Hypothesis. And we’ve grown from a handful of people into a team of more than 35 passionate web builders. We’re not stopping here.

We’ve always had our sights set on the bigger idea: that this still-nascent effort can blossom into a true network of interoperable services — a rich ecosystem of collaboration, conversation and community over all knowledge. We believe that when incentives are aligned toward quality and away from monetizing attention, we can produce something of profound social importance. A utility layer for humanity. Since launch, the Hypothesis Project has been incorporated as a nonprofit. And while our nonprofit was an excellent home for our mission, it also limited us to grants and donations. Though we were beginning to provide services that we could charge for, we still needed capital to expand. Frustratingly, while our needs were growing, several of the key funding sources we’d relied on were no longer available to us as they shuttered programs or changed strategies. In 2019, we and others formed Invest In Open Infrastructure (IOI), an “initiative to dramatically increase the amount of funding available to open scholarly infrastructure.” We recruited Kaitlin Thaney to that effort, and she has been doing a terrific job laying the foundation for this. But all this would take time we didn’t have.

In response, and to better position us to achieve our long-held mission, we’ve formed Anno, a public benefit corporation (aka “Annotation Unlimited, PBC”) that shares the Hypothesis mission as well as its team. We’ve done this so that we can take investment in a mission aligned way and scale the Hypothesis service to meet the opportunity in front of us. Anno is funded by a $14M seed round that includes a $2.5M investment from ITHAKA, the nonprofit provider of JSTOR, a digital library that serves more than 13,000 education institutions around the world, providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Also participating in the round are At.inc, Triage Ventures, Esther Dyson, Mark Pincus and others. ITHAKA’s president, Kevin Guthrie, has joined Anno’s board as an observer….”

ITHAKA invests in open-annotation leader Hypothesis – ITHAKA

“ITHAKA is investing in the leading open annotation service Hypothesis. Hypothesis—developed with funding from the Sloan, Mellon and other foundations—allows users to make private, semi-private, or public annotations on any webpage, PDF, or document. This $2.5 million investment—made to Anno, the public-benefit corporation that is home to Hypothesis—furthers ITHAKA’s mission to expand access to knowledge and education by supporting a key component of open higher education infrastructure: interoperable teaching and learning tools that positively impact student learning outcomes.

Hypothesis is available as a free browser extension as well as a fee-based enterprise service that integrates annotation functionality directly into college and university learning management systems. It has a million users globally and more than 200 institutional customers. Faculty and students are using Hypothesis in the classroom to annotate course material, generating asynchronous discussion around specific texts. This relatively simple activity of coming together virtually around an assigned reading, known as social annotation, is making an impact. At Wake Forest University, Hypothesis is now being used by over 60% of all students across all disciplines. Recent case studies, like this one analyzing social annotation in three undergraduate courses at a Canadian university, are also showing evidence of its potential….”

ITHAKA invests in open annotation leader HypothesisA letter from Kevin Guthrie – News – About JSTOR

“I am excited to share today that we have invested $2.5 million in Anno, the public-benefit corporation that is home to Hypothesis.

As you may know, Hypothesis is a tool that enables people to annotate documents and webpages. Its free browser extension is in use by a million people globally, with a version that integrates with learning management systems now installed at 200 colleges and universities. We see tremendous potential for tools like Hypothesis that are open and interoperable to improve teaching and learning.

In addition to the investment, we are working on a pilot project with Anno to enable the use of Hypothesis with the text-based materials on JSTOR through learning management systems. As an organization with a mission to expand access to knowledge and education, ITHAKA’s investment and this collaboration will support the use and study of the materials you and we have worked so hard to produce, preserve and make accessible. I encourage you to read our public announcement as well as Anno’s blog post for more details….”

ITHAKA invests in open annotation leader HypothesisA letter from Kevin Guthrie – News – About JSTOR

“I am excited to share today that we have invested $2.5 million in Anno, the public-benefit corporation that is home to Hypothesis.

As you may know, Hypothesis is a tool that enables people to annotate documents and webpages. Its free browser extension is in use by a million people globally, with a version that integrates with learning management systems now installed at 200 colleges and universities. We see tremendous potential for tools like Hypothesis that are open and interoperable to improve teaching and learning.

In addition to the investment, we are working on a pilot project with Anno to enable the use of Hypothesis with the text-based materials on JSTOR through learning management systems. As an organization with a mission to expand access to knowledge and education, ITHAKA’s investment and this collaboration will support the use and study of the materials you and we have worked so hard to produce, preserve and make accessible. I encourage you to read our public announcement as well as Anno’s blog post for more details….”

Read and Annotate with UM Press – University of Michigan Press Blog

“The University of Michigan Press is launching a new social annotation project: UM Press Annotates. With UM Press Annotates, we are inviting readers to share their digital marginalia to engage in new scholarly conversations.

Our ebook platform Fulcrum uses Hypothesis, a tool for social annotation across the web, to allow readers to write public and private annotations on our more than 250 open-access titles. With our Fund-To-Mission initiative, the number of open-access titles grows each season….”

What’s That Sound? A Million People Annotating : Hypothesis

“To all the people out there adding your thoughts, questions, memes, and corrections to the margins of digital texts, let’s celebrate our latest milestone together: One million people are annotating with Hypothesis! What does it mean that one million individuals are annotating? More and more people are harnessing the power of social annotation to teach and learn, to publish, to conduct research, to fact check and report news, to keep personal notes, to advance open source technology, and so much more.

And, of course, one million people annotating adds up to a lot of annotations. Just since July, when the community of annotators reached a record 25 million annotations, we’ve climbed to 28 million. With annotations coming so fast, we’re now just celebrating the bigger leaps forward — see you at 50 million?…”

Automated screening of COVID-19 preprints: can we help authors to improve transparency and reproducibility? | Nature Medicine

“Although automated screening is not a replacement for peer review, automated tools can identify common problems. Examples include failure to state whether experiments were blinded or randomized2, failure to report the sex of participants2 and misuse of bar graphs to display continuous data3. We have been using six tools4,5,6,7,8 to screen all new medRxiv and bioRxiv COVID-19 preprints (Table 1). New preprints are screened daily9. By this means, reports on more than 8,000 COVID preprints have been shared using the web annotation tool hypothes.is (RRID:SCR_000430) and have been tweeted out via @SciScoreReports (https://hypothes.is/users/sciscore). Readers can access these reports in two ways. The first option is to find the link to the report in the @SciScoreReports tweet in the preprint’s Twitter feed, located in the metrics tab. The second option is to download the hypothes.is bookmarklet. In addition, readers and authors can reply to the reports, which also contain information on solutions….”

Automated screening of COVID-19 preprints: can we help authors to improve transparency and reproducibility? | Nature Medicine

“Although automated screening is not a replacement for peer review, automated tools can identify common problems. Examples include failure to state whether experiments were blinded or randomized2, failure to report the sex of participants2 and misuse of bar graphs to display continuous data3. We have been using six tools4,5,6,7,8 to screen all new medRxiv and bioRxiv COVID-19 preprints (Table 1). New preprints are screened daily9. By this means, reports on more than 8,000 COVID preprints have been shared using the web annotation tool hypothes.is (RRID:SCR_000430) and have been tweeted out via @SciScoreReports (https://hypothes.is/users/sciscore). Readers can access these reports in two ways. The first option is to find the link to the report in the @SciScoreReports tweet in the preprint’s Twitter feed, located in the metrics tab. The second option is to download the hypothes.is bookmarklet. In addition, readers and authors can reply to the reports, which also contain information on solutions….”

Accessing early scientific findings | Early Evidence Base

“Early Evidence Base (EEB) is an experimental platform that combines artificial intelligence with human curation and expert peer-review to highlight results posted in preprints. EEB is a technology experiment developed by EMBO Press and SourceData.

Preprints provide the scientific community with early access to scientific evidence. For experts, this communication channel is an efficient way to accesss research without delay and thus to accelerate scientific progress. But for non-experts, navigating preprints can be challenging: in absence of peer-review and journal certification, interpreting the data and evaluating the strength of the conclusions is often impossible; finding specific and relevant information in the rapidly accumulating corpus of preprints is becoming increasingly difficult.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has made this tradeoff even more visible. The urgency in understanding and combatting SARS-CoV-2 viral infection has stimulated an unprecedented rate of preprint posting. It has however also revealed the risk resulting from misinterpretation of preliminary results shared in preprint and with amplification or perpetuating prelimature claims by non-experts or the media.

To experiment with ways in which technology and human expertise can be combined to address these issues, EMBO has built the EEB. The platform prioritizes preprints in complementary ways:

Refereed Preprints are preprints that are associated with reviews. EEB prioritizes such preprints and integrates the content of the reviews as well as the authors’ response, when available, to provide rich context and in-depth analyses of the reported research.
To highlight the importance of experimental evidence, EEB automatically highlights and organizes preprints around scientific topics and emergent areas of research.
Finally, EEB provides an automated selection of preprints that are enriched in studies that were peer reviewed, may bridge several areas of research and use a diversity of experimental approaches….”

 

Our 10 Millionth Annotation – Hypothesis

“Hypothesis just reached its 10 millionth annotation. Half of those have happened in the last year.

This milestone is the achievement of a community: all the scientists, scholars, journalists, authors, publishers, fact-checkers, technologists and, now more than ever, teachers and students who have used and valued collaborative annotation over the years. Thank you all for reaching this momentous number with us, especially during this challenging time….”

Hypothesis for Instructional Continuity During COVID-19 – Hypothesis

“Over the past weeks, our contacts at schools, colleges, and universities have been writing to us asking about how they can use Hypothesis in response to campus closures and the move to online courses as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. We’d like to help.

Collaborative annotation can help connect students and teachers while they keep their distance to safeguard their health during the current crisis. Reading alongside and interacting with each other using Hypothesis is about as close to a seminar-style experience as they can have online.

To support the role that collaborative annotation can play in facilitating expanded online classes, Hypothesis is waiving all fees to educational institutions for the remainder of 2020, and will evaluate whether to extend this as the current situation develops. Existing partners can request a refund or apply any fees that they have already paid towards future costs….”

Transparent review in preprints – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

“Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) today announced a new pilot project—Transparent Review in Preprints (TRiP)—that enables journals and peer review services to post peer reviews of submitted manuscripts on CSHL’s preprint server bioRxiv.

“The new project is part of broader efforts by bioRxiv to work with other organizations to help the scholarly publishing ecosystem evolve,” said John Inglis, co-founder of bioRxiv at CSHL.

The project is powered by the web annotation tool Hypothesis and will allow participating organizations to post peer reviews in dedicated Hypothesis groups alongside relevant preprints on the bioRxiv website. Authors must opt-in with the journal/service in advance. The use of restricted Hypothesis groups allows participating organizations to control the process and ensure that only reviews they approve are displayed. Readers will continue to be able to post their own reactions to individual preprints through bioRxiv’s dedicated comment section.

eLife and the EMBO Press journals, together with Peerage of Science and Review Commons, two journal-independent peer review initiatives, will be the first to participate. Several other groups plan to join the pilot later, including the American Society for Plant Biology and the Public Library of Science….”

Enabling A Conversation Across Scholarly Monographs through Open Annotation

Abstract:  The digital format opens up new possibilities for interaction with monographic publications. In particular, annotation tools make it possible to broaden the discussion on the content of a book, to suggest new ideas, to report errors or inaccuracies, and to conduct open peer reviews. However, this requires the support of the users who might not yet be familiar with the annotation of digital documents. This paper will give concrete examples and recommendations for exploiting the potential of annotation in academic research and teaching. After presenting the annotation tool of Hypothesis, the article focuses on its use in the context of HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), a project aimed to improve the Open Access digital monograph. The general line and the aims of a post-peer review experiment with the annotation tool, as well as its usage in didactic activities concerning monographic publications are presented and proposed as potential best practices for similar annotation activities.

Open Web annotation as collaborative learning | Kalir | First Monday

Abstract:  This paper describes the use of open Web annotation (OWA) for collaborative learning among online communities. OWA is defined by the open standards, principles, and practices associated with the open Web. Specifically, this case study examines collaborative learning mediated by the OWA technology Hypothesis, a standards-compliant and open-source technology that situates collaboration in texts-as-contexts. Hypothesis OWA supports a repertoire of six collaborative learning practices: Affording multimodal expression, establishing connections across contexts, archiving activity, visualizing expertise and cognition, contributing to open educational resources, and fostering open educational practices. The use of Hypothesis OWA is then described in three online communities associated with scientific research and communication, educator professional development, and Web literacy and fact-checking. The article concludes by advancing three broad questions and related research agendas regarding how OWA as collaborative learning attends to linkages among formal and informal learning environments, the growth of both open educational resources and practices, and the use of open data as learning analytics.

Announcing Invest in Open Infrastructure – Hypothesis

Today, together with a set of global partnersHypothesis is proud to announce the formation of Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) — a new initiative to dramatically increase the amount of funding available to open scholarly infrastructure….

Projects like Hypothesis are extremely difficult to begin, grow and sustain over time. We were fortunate to have had early believers on Kickstarter, and then stalwart supporters in over the last 8 years in foundations like Sloan, Mellon, Shuttleworth, Knight, Helmsley and Omidyar. However, this foundation support is still insufficient to the longer term, larger funding required to bridge to a sustainable future for most open projects, including ours. Foundations tend to support early projects, but that support usually falls off with time. The kind of mezzanine funding that a for-profit technology might find from venture groups in later stages is simply not available within the ecosystem of non-profit, open source projects.

The core problem is that the true consumers of scholarly infrastructure — namely the researchers, scholars and their institutions and agencies which form the gross majority of users — have the means to sustain it, but lack the structure to do so. The libraries know of a few platforms that they need and provide direct support, but there are hundreds of other projects for which there is no visibility at the institutional level, because they’re still early, or because researchers rather than institutions themselves depend on them directly. Projects like Hypothesis, like any technology infrastructure trying to scale over years to maturity, need ongoing funding until sustainability can be achieved.

 

What is needed is a coordinating system which can identify, track and assess open infrastructure across diverse categories and constituencies and make recommendations to funders who can pool their resources to sustain it. This coordinating system is exactly the idea behind IOI….”