Ingenta Integrates Open Annotation with Hypothesis
This quarter Ingenta and Hypothesis announced the integration of open annotation technology right across the Ingenta Connect and upcoming Ingenta Open platforms. Open annotation is a powerful tool that enables users to engage deeply with publications of record, making private notes, public annotations, and private collaboration groups across any web-based content, including webpages, PDFs and EPUBs. With this integration, Ingenta publishers can use Hypothesis to bring branded and moderated annotation layers to all types of content, from articles and books to data. Contact Hypothesis now to get started with this affordable way to engage communities with content using annotation.
Why open, interoperable annotation? In February 2017, the W3C — the standards body for the web — published the first web annotation standards. These standards lay the foundation for a future where annotation becomes a central part of the web just like search is now. As a nonprofit organization that develops and stewards open-source annotation technologies and practices, Hypothesis is working to ensure interoperability so that annotations made now will persist as the capability becomes a part of common practices in publishing, research, scholarship, journalism, and teaching and learning.
Publishers are using annotation to streamline the peer review process, enabling in-line questions and responses between reviewers, editors, and authors. Authors and invited experts are annotating to create additional content, connecting supplementary materials and data. Hypothesis also enables post-publication discussion to help researchers collaborate directly on published works.
In addition, publishers are experimenting with annotation around entity extraction. Currently, more than 125 papers in neuroscience use RRIDs (Research Resource IDs) which are essential in reproducibility. SciBot, an annotation service managed out of the University of California at San Diego, looks for RRIDs in papers that use Hypothesis and displays related external database information in the form of annotation cards. Each RRID receives a tag so users can easily see all annotated papers that use the same resource. Publishers are interested in using this technology to enhance other identifiers, such as celestial data and figures.
Researchers are using Hypothesis in all stages of the research life cycle. All annotations automatically populate to a user’s profile page for easy search and viewing. Tags offer a simple way to organize annotations. Researchers can also explore the public annotation stream, recently included in the Crossref Event Data project, to discover papers their peers are annotating. With the capacity to connect resources through deep linking, annotations are themselves becoming research items. Librarians are considering how best to track this output by their faculty.
Beyond publishing, annotation is also widely used in teaching and learning: Hypothesis recently celebrated two million annotations, many of which were made by students as educators are increasingly assigning annotation in close readings that integrate discussion forums into texts, and fact-checking assignments that promote digital literacy.
Please contact Hypothesis if you are interested in learning more.