"Writing with CHATGPT: An Illustration of Its Capacity, Limitations & Implications for Academic Writers"


Rather than being alarmed or anxious, writers need to understand ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses. It is better at structure than it is at content. It is a good brainstorming tool (think titles, outlines, counter-arguments), but you must double check everything it tells you, especially if you’re outside your domain of expertise. It can provide summaries of complex ideas, and connect them with other ideas, but only if you have put a lot of thought into the incremental prompting needed to shift it from its generic default and train it to focus on what you care about. Its access to information is limited to what it was originally trained on, therefore your own training phase is essential to identify gaps and inaccuracies. It can be used for labor, such as reformatting abstracts or reducing the length of sections, but it can’t replace the thinking a writer does to determine why some paragraphs or ideas deserve more words and others can be cut back. It can be inaccurate: in fact, rather stubbornly so, persisting with inaccuracies even after they are pointed out, while at the same time presenting its next attempt as corrected.

https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.1072

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"Unreviewed Science in the News: The Evolution of Preprint Media Coverage from 2014-2021"


It has been argued that preprint coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a paradigm shift in journalism norms and practices. This study examines whether, in what ways, and to what extent this is the case using a sample of 11,538 preprints posted on four preprint servers—bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and SSRN—that received coverage in 94 English-language media outlets between 2014-2021. We compared mentions of these preprints with mentions of a comparison sample of 397,446 peer reviewed research articles indexed in the Web of Science to identify changes in the share of media coverage that mentioned preprints before and during the pandemic. We found that preprint media coverage increased at a slow but steady rate pre-pandemic, then spiked dramatically. This increase applied only to COVID-19-related preprints, with minimal or no change in coverage of preprints on other topics. In addition, the rise in preprint coverage was most pronounced among health and medicine-focused media outlets, which barely covered preprints before the pandemic but mentioned more COVID-19 preprints than outlets focused on any other topic. These results suggest that the growth in coverage of preprints seen during the pandemic period may imply a shift in journalistic norms, including a changing outlook on reporting preliminary, unvetted research.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.07.10.548392

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"CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access Research and Large Language Models for Credible, Trustworthy Question Answering"


In this paper, we present CORE-GPT, a novel question-answering platform that combines GPT-based language models and more than 32 million full-text open access scientific articles from CORE. We first demonstrate that GPT3.5 and GPT4 cannot be relied upon to provide references or citations for generated text. We then introduce CORE-GPT which delivers evidence-based answers to questions, along with citations and links to the cited papers, greatly increasing the trustworthiness of the answers and reducing the risk of hallucinations. CORE-GPT’s performance was evaluated on a dataset of 100 questions covering the top 20 scientific domains in CORE, resulting in 100 answers and links to 500 relevant articles. The quality of the provided answers and and relevance of the links were assessed by two annotators. Our results demonstrate that CORE-GPT can produce comprehensive and trustworthy answers across the majority of scientific domains, complete with links to genuine, relevant scientific articles.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04683

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"Cite-Seeing and Reviewing: A Study on Citation Bias in Peer Review"


Citations play an important role in researchers’ careers as a key factor in evaluation of scientific impact. Many anecdotes advice authors to exploit this fact and cite prospective reviewers to try obtaining a more positive evaluation for their submission. In this work, we investigate if such a citation bias actually exists: Does the citation of a reviewer’s own work in a submission cause them to be positively biased towards the submission? In conjunction with the review process of two flagship conferences in machine learning and algorithmic economics, we execute an observational study to test for citation bias in peer review. In our analysis, we carefully account for various confounding factors such as paper quality and reviewer expertise, and apply different modeling techniques to alleviate concerns regarding the model mismatch. Overall, our analysis involves 1,314 papers and 1,717 reviewers and detects citation bias in both venues we consider. In terms of the effect size, by citing a reviewer’s work, a submission has a non-trivial chance of getting a higher score from the reviewer: an expected increase in the score is approximately 0.23 on a 5-point Likert item. For reference, a one-point increase of a score by a single reviewer improves the position of a submission by 11% on average.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283980

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Data and Visualization Librarian at North Carolina A&T State University


Reporting to the Head of Digital Scholarship and Research Data Services, this individual will develop and provide services that support students, faculty and researchers in the discovery, use, preservation, and visualization of data. The individual will coordinate and teach instruction sessions and programming related to research data management and data visualization and will provide consultations for researchers in collaboration with subject librarians.

https://jobs.ncat.edu/postings/28977

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"The Role of Author Identities in Peer Review"


There is widespread debate on whether to anonymize author identities in peer review. The key argument for anonymization is to mitigate bias, whereas arguments against anonymization posit various uses of author identities in the review process. The Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) 2023 conference adopted a middle ground by initially anonymizing the author identities from reviewers, revealing them after the reviewer had submitted their initial reviews, and allowing the reviewer to change their review subsequently. We present an analysis of the reviews pertaining to the identification and use of author identities. Our key findings are: (I) A majority of reviewers self-report not knowing and being unable to guess the authors’ identities for the papers they were reviewing. (II) After the initial submission of reviews, 7.1% of reviews changed their overall merit score and 3.8% changed their self-reported reviewer expertise. (III) There is a very weak and statistically insignificant correlation of the rank of authors’ affiliations with the change in overall merit; there is a weak but statistically significant correlation with respect to change in reviewer expertise. We also conducted an anonymous survey to obtain opinions from reviewers and authors. The main findings from the 200 survey responses are: (i) A vast majority of participants favor anonymizing author identities in some form. (ii) The “middle-ground” initiative of ITCS 2023 was appreciated. (iii) Detecting conflicts of interest is a challenge that needs to be addressed if author identities are anonymized. Overall, these findings support anonymization of author identities in some form (e.g., as was done in ITCS 2023), as long as there is a robust and efficient way to check conflicts of interest.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286206

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"Factors Affecting Publication Impact and Citation Trends Over Time"


Based on the results, researchers should seek out grant funding and generously incorporate literature into their co-authored publications to increase their publications’ potential for future impact. These factors may influence article quality, resulting in more citations over time. Further research is needed to better understand their influence and the influence of other factors.

https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip30206

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| Digital Scholarship |

Scholarly Podcasting Why, What, How?


Featuring interviews with 101 podcasting academics, including scholars and teachers of podcasting, this book explores the motivations of scholarly podcasters, interrogates what podcasting does to academic knowledge, and leads potential podcasters through the creation process from beginning to end. With scholarship often trapped inside expensive journals, wrapped in opaque language, and laced with a standoffish tone, this book analyses the implications of moving towards a more open and accessible form.

https://tinyurl.com/mr3b9bew

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"Can Open Access Increase LIS Research’s Policy Impact? Using Regression Analysis and Causal Inference"


The relationship between open access and academic impact (usually measured as citations received from academic publications) has been extensively studied but remains a very controversial topic. However, the effect of open access on policy impact (measured as citations received from policy documents) is still unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of open access on the policy impact, which might initiate a new controversial topic. . . . Linear regression models, logit regression models, four other matching methods, open access status provided by different databases, and different sizes of data samples were used to check the robustness of the main results. This study revealed that open access had significant and positive effects on the policy impact.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04750-1

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"Mastodon over Mammon — Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"


Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

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Cataloging and Digital Projects Librarian at University of Arkansas in Fayetteville


Reporting to the Director for Content Services, the Cataloging and Digital Projects Librarian serves as the primary metadata specialist for the Libraries’ CONTENTdm digital collections, working collaboratively with the department head, the Digital Services Department, the Special Collections Division, and other staff in Content Services to complete individual projects. The librarian also collaborates with the Office of Scholarly Communications and User Services to create metadata for University of Arkansas Department of Music concert recordings in the ScholarWorks (Digital Commons) institutional repository. The librarian harvests ScholarWorks metadata for graduate theses and dissertations for import into WorldCat and Alma. The librarian creates metadata for other types of digital projects and collections as needed and performs original and complex copy cataloging for media materials in a variety of formats.

https://bit.ly/44aS83U

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"How Related are Journal Impact and Research Impact? "


The dominance of journal impact factors as a proxy for research quality and impact has been challenged, to the extent that academic impacts are being eroded from definitions of research impact all together. It’s one of many bandwagons that seem logical to jump on, but which don’t necessarily hold up under scrutiny. The publishing community needs to demonstrate that it is a following wind, not a headwind.

http://bit.ly/3GBv0kS

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Transparent Peer Review Test: "Publishing Review Reports to Reveal and Preserve the Quality and Fairness of the Peer Review Process"


The European Journal of Higher Education seeks to pioneer the policy of ‘transparent peer review’ among higher education journals by publishing anonymous peer review reports to demonstrate the rigour of its peer review process. Starting in April 2023, the European Journal of Higher Education will start a pilot policy to publish the peer review report with the published article. Hence, any submission received after the launch of the policy and accepted for publication will at the time of publication include a link to an open access online peer review report including anonymous peer reviews from all rounds of review, while not including the responses of the authors.

https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2023.2192549

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"Nothing about Us without Us: the Roles of Diverse Stakeholders in Scientific Publishing"


Publisher codes of ethics, and how they are enforced, should occupy a larger part of the discourse around scientific ethics and, in turn, influence where scientists choose to publish. The current editorial policies of many major scientific journals describe how journals enforce the code of ethics for scientists, not the rules that govern the publishing process itself. Why should scientists ask their journals to publish an editorial policy akin to a newsroom operations ethics policy (https://www.washingtonpost.com/policies-and-standards/)? Publishers play a pivotal role in filtering stories. Through their definitions and weighting of significance/impact/novelty, scientific editors select the stories that get sent out for peer review, pick the peer reviewers, and arbitrate the peer review process. In addition, while scientific institutions are responsible for adjudicating charges of scientific misconduct, journals are responsible for managing retractions. Thus, journals determine who gets published (and when) and set the pace of retractions. In other words, they play multiple roles in scientific governance. Finally, biased publishing outcomes—where a group is underrepresented in the pool of published authors relative to the pool of eligible authors—have been documented at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) (1) and other journals. . . .

In the face of biased publishing outcomes, what should we expect of our publishers? Research is often conducted using money from federally funded grants. The publication fees we pay, if not taken from federal grant funding, are in some way supported by it. As a consequence, we can expect that publishers will meet their responsibility, not just to us, but also to the taxpayers of ensuring fairness in what gets reported. If publishers were to make transparent the principles that guide their decisions, then scientists could use these new policies (and accountability for them) to determine where to publish, rather than using impact factor as a single guiding light.

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Paywall: "What Is Data Stewardship? Towards a Comprehensive Understanding;"


Data stewardship is a term that is understood in heterogenous ways. . . . Following on from these different understandings and from recent developments to include ever more stakeholders in data stewardship, we propose a comprehensive understanding of data stewardship. According to this comprehensive understanding, data stewardship includes responsibilities towards all pertinent stakeholders and to equally consider and respect their legitimate rights and interests in order to build and maintain an efficient, trusted and fair data ecosystem. We also point out some of the practical challenges implied in such a comprehensive understanding.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2023.104337

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"Transparency in Conducting and Reporting Research: A Survey of Authors, Reviewers, and Editors across Scholarly Disciplines"


Calls have been made for improving transparency in conducting and reporting research, improving work climates, and preventing detrimental research practices. To assess attitudes and practices regarding these topics, we sent a survey to authors, reviewers, and editors. We received 3,659 (4.9%) responses out of 74,749 delivered emails. We found no significant differences between authors’, reviewers’, and editors’ attitudes towards transparency in conducting and reporting research, or towards their perceptions of work climates. Undeserved authorship was perceived by all groups as the most prevalent detrimental research practice, while fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and not citing prior relevant research, were seen as more prevalent by editors than authors or reviewers. Overall, 20% of respondents admitted sacrificing the quality of their publications for quantity, and 14% reported that funders interfered in their study design or reporting. While survey respondents came from 126 different countries, due to the survey’s overall low response rate our results might not necessarily be generalizable. Nevertheless, results indicate that greater involvement of all stakeholders is needed to align actual practices with current recommendations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270054

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"ChatGPT and a New Academic Reality: Artificial Intelligence-Written Research Papers and the Ethics of the Large Language Models in Scholarly Publishing"


The history and principles behind ChatGPT and similar models are discussed. This technology is then discussed in relation to its potential impact on academia and scholarly research and publishing. ChatGPT is seen as a potential model for the automated preparation of essays and other types of scholarly manuscripts. Potential ethical issues that could arise with the emergence of large language models like GPT-3. . . and its usage by academics and researchers, are discussed and situated within the context of broader advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing for research and scholarly publishing.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24750

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Systems and Web Services Librarian at Wright State University


Reporting to the Head of Library Technology Services, the Systems and Web Services Librarian provides management and coordination of the University Libraries’ web presence including the website, catalog, and other end-user platforms, and maintains library web services interfaces to ensure usability, accessibility, and brand consistency.. . . The Systems and Web Services Librarian is responsible for the Libraries’ authentication systems, working with vendors and the Computing and Telecommunications department to ensure uninterrupted access to licensed library electronic resources.

https://jobs.wright.edu/postings/18148

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| Digital Scholarship |

Digital Library Manager at London School of Economics and Political Science


The post-holder is responsible for initiating and implementing digital service developments, actively seeking opportunities for collaborative partnerships with researchers and external organisations and creatively delivering new ways to make digital collections available. This work involves close liaison with Library collections specialists, researchers, colleagues in service divisions in the School and external suppliers. The post-holder will particularly work closely with the Collections Management team who are responsible for delivering on-site digitisation and digital preservation. As well as managing the operational digital library service, the postholder will manage development projects, often supported by external funding.

bit.ly/3J2RMnI

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"Mastodon over Mammon — Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"


Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record —encompassing text, data and code —to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

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Digital Public Library of America: "Palace Marketplace to Offer More Than 200,000 New Titles By Independent Authors"


Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce the launch of a new independent author catalog in Palace Marketplace. Palace Marketplace now offers more than 1.2 million ebooks and audiobooks from all of the quot;Big 5" publishers, Amazon Publishing, Audible, hundreds of mid-sized and independent publishers, and independent authors. . . .Beginning on February 16, 2023, Palace Marketplace will offer more than 200,000 titles from Smashwords and Draft2Digital. At launch, all of these titles will be available with a perpetual one-at-a-time license, often at less than $10 per title, with more licensing options to be made available in the coming months. As an additional service to libraries, the DPLA Curation Corps of librarians will be preparing selections of recommended titles to help libraries quickly and easily identify titles appropriate for their collections.

bit.ly/3jI8sHd

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"Research Productivity Among Scholarly Communication Librarians"


Introduction: A growing number of academic libraries have specialized their support for scholarly communication by creating new positions or by expanding units with a focus on providing relevant services. This study was undertaken to explore the extent to which librarians with scholarly communication responsibilities produce research and scholarship, their motivations for doing so, the nature of that productivity, and the perceived impact of that activity on their professional responsibilities. Methods: The authors administered a survey of librarians who identified as having their primary job responsibilities in scholarly communication. Results: Almost all study participants produced their own scholarly work. However, a high percentage indicated that they received no relevant training in their library degree programs, and the majority experienced imposter syndrome pertaining to their own scholarship. Although most respondents were motivated to produce research by institutional expectations for promotion and tenure, greater percentages were driven by personal or professional interests. In addition, participants indicated a strong correlation between producing their own scholarship and their ability to effectively carry out their professional responsibilities. Discussion: There may be an emerging convention for scholarly communication librarianship, i.e., one that includes open education services. Findings suggest a need for scholarly communication training to be more prominent in library degree programs. They also point to the utility of making research production a job requirement, regardless of institutional expectations for professional advancement. Conclusion: The authors argue for adjustments in library education curricula and the inclusion of research production in the portfolios of scholarly communication librarians. Future research directions are proposed.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15621

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"Digital Commons to Hyku: An Institutional Repository Migration at a Small Liberal Arts University"


Introduction: Pacific University Libraries has had an institutional repository since 2009, when it selected Digital Commons to host a collection of theses and dissertations. Since then, the scope of the services has grown to include publishing open access journals as well as housing the books published by Pacific University Press—a library-born, hybrid, open access press. As our needs have changed, and with Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress in 2017, the University migrated from bepress’ Digital Commons platform to an open source Hyku platform hosted by Ubiquity Repositories. Description of Program: As the first academic institution working with Ubiquity Repositories on migration and implementation, we were involved in the process of data extraction, normalization, mapping, ingest, and validation. Lessons Learned: We learned the importance of having a mutual understanding of a platform’s goals, data structure and mapping, and standards in implementation decisions. Next Steps: As higher education continues to adapt to the changes brought by COVID-19, it has never seemed more important to utilize platforms that share the values of libraries worldwide. We hope that migrating to an open source platform will be a step toward more open scholarship, despite the current challenges and resource scarcity brought about by the pandemic.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.12916

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