Remarq goes beyond annotations to create an entire system of engagement around journal articles, with levels of engagement that users can use as they see fit:
- Private engagement with content – highlighting and private annotations
- Semi-private engagement – article-sharing, following articles, polls, profiles
- Public engagement – qualified comments, post-publication reviews, and author and editor updates
This approach, which is essentially “decentralized social,” provides a combination of features that David Worlock described succinctly in a recent blog post:
“Remarq . . . enable[s] any publisher to create community around annotated discussion and turn it into scholarly exchange and collaboration.”
Publishers and users are familiar with the downsides of centralized social media — algorithms that litter feeds with misinformation or distractions; social networks filled with irrelevant comments from anonymous or unqualified users; and no private layer for personal work. With centralized scholarly collaboration networks, the costs can be even steeper, as some centralized social approaches have depended upon users filling these systems with source content from publishers’ sites.
Remarq “flips the script” by bringing the social features to the publishers’ sites, tailoring them to scholarly communication, and allowing publishers and users to benefit from an approach that doesn’t require unacceptable compromises (e.g., content leakage, user displacement, aggressive social feeds).
By decentralizing the scholarly collaboration network, Remarq is able to both unify experiences across disparate information sources, platforms, and outlets, while creating customized local implementations with a shared digital DNA.
You can find out more about Remarq’s approach to the decentralized scholarly collaboration network at https://remarqable.com.