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Talking head research tops Altmetric chart


A research paper on synthesising realistic video-sequences of speech and expressions to mimic a particular individual has become the most widely- shared in the Altmetric 100’s seven-year history.


The annual Altmetric Top 100 highlights


research published in 2019 that generated significant international online attention. Many of 2019’s most polarising issues, from the increasing use of artificial intelligence to the climate emergency facing the population, are included in this year’s chart. The top 10 articles of 2019 are:


• Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models (Arxiv, May 2019);


• Scientists rise up against statistical significance (Nature, March 2019);


• Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism (Annals of Internal Medicine, April 2019);


• World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency (BioScience, November 2019);


• A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks (Arxiv, December 2018);


• Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-


sex sexual behaviour (Science, August 2019);


• New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding (Nature Communications, October 2019);


• Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomised controlled trial (British Medical Journal, December 2018);


• The global tree restoration potential (Science, July 2019); and


• Civic honesty around the globe (Science, July 2019). The Altmetric Top 100 typically features research from a variety of disciplines, by authors from all corners of the globe. Other diverse subjects highlighted include the prorogation of Parliament, fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, mortality and survival in Game of Thrones, how Brexit will affect health services in the UK, and racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations. Egor Zakharov and Victor Lempitsky are two of the authors of the most discussed academic paper of this year, which looks at creating systems that can synthesise realistic video- sequences of speech and expressions


Jisc steps up open access initatives


Five UK-based society publishers have signed pilot transitional open access (OA) agreements with the not-for- profit organisation Jisc. The agreements are the first to result from work undertaken by Jisc Collections, negotiating with smaller publishers to offer a sustainable transition to OA. The Microbiology Society,


Portland Press, IWA Publishing, the Company of Biologists and the European Respiratory Society now offer transitional journal agreements through the national Jisc consortium. These ‘read and publish’ two- year pilots allow 100 per cent of UK scholarly output to be published OA in the societies’ hybrid journals, with some including fully OA titles in the fixed-price deals. Kathryn Spiller, licensing


manager at Jisc, who has worked with the societies to negotiate the agreements, said: ‘OA publishing is becoming within reach, especially now Wellcome has confirmed that these agreements are in compliance with their policy and that their funds can be used to support these agreements. Together we’ll continue to explore new ways in which small learned societies can transition to OA in a sustainable way.’ The Charity Open Access


Fund (COAF), a partnership between six health research charities, including the Wellcome Trust, invested £1.3m in OA publishing fees (APCs) with UK-based self- publishing learned societies between 2016 and 2018. These five publishers account


26 Research Information February/March 2020


for just under a third of this investment. Through these agreements,


the sector transitions away from hundreds of individual APC payments to a fixed annual payment between the institution and the publisher, reducing the administrative burden on researchers, institutions, funders and publishers. Robert Kiley, head of open


research at Wellcome, added: ‘Institutions in receipt of COAF OA funding are able to use these funds to offset the publishing costs for COAF- attributed research published under these agreements.’ Meanwhile, researchers


at up to 58 universities will benefit from a new OA ‘read and publish’ agreement between Jisc and IOP


Publishing (IOPP), a pioneer in OA physics publishing. The four-year agreement began on 1 January. It enables unlimited OA publishing for affiliated corresponding authors in 44 of IOPP’s subscription journals, without barriers or charges Members will have reading


access to 75 of IOPP’s journals, covering physics, materials science, biosciences, astronomy and astrophysics, environmental sciences, mathematics and education. Anna Vernon, Jisc Collection’s head of licensing, said: ‘This contract offers highly optimised workflows for different institutions, giving access to even more open access journals and removing administrative burdens for libraries and academics.’


@researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


that mimic a particular individual. Zakharov said: ‘Our paper is inspired by the need to develop better telepresence solutions for augmented and virtual reality. The important component of telepresence applications is a realistic simulation of a person’s appearance, which we try to perfect with the power of deep learning.’ Lempitsky added: ‘Our technology can learn photorealistic head avatars from a handful of images of a person, using a new deep learning model trained on a large dataset of videos of celebrities.’ The paper is the most widely shared in the Altmetric Top 100’s seven-year history. Catherine Williams, COO at Altmetric, said: ‘In 2019, it’s clear that our current climate emergency and political polarisation are a matter of huge public concern and debate. This list demonstrates the critical role that research plays in those conversations.’ This year’s list features works published in 43 different journals, pre-print servers, and government websites. The Harvard University authors appeared most often in the list (11 papers), while the journal Nature featured more than any other (12


times). l View the full list at https:/www. altmetric.com/top100/2019/


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