Category: Scholarly Journals

"The Limitations to Our Understanding of Peer Review"

Jonathan Tennant and Tony Ross-Hellauer have self-archived "The Limitations to Our Understanding of Peer Review."

Here's an excerpt:

Peer review is embedded in the core of our scholarly knowledge generation systems, conferring legitimacy on research while distributing academic capital and prestige on individuals. Despite its critical importance, it curiously remains poorly understood in a number of dimensions. In order to address this, we have programmatically analysed peer review to assess where the major gaps in our theoretical and empirical understanding of it lie. We distill this into core themes around editorial accountability, the subjectivity and bias of reviewers, the function and quality of peer review, the role of the reviewer, the social and epistemic implications of peer review, and regarding innovations in open peer review platforms and services. We use this to present a guide for the future of peer review, and the development of a new research discipline based on the study of peer review. Such a field requires sustained funding and commitment from publishers and research funders, who both have a commitment to uphold the integrity of the published scholarly record. This will require the design of a consensus for a minimal set of standards for what constitutes peer review, and the development of a shared data infrastructure to support this. We recognise that many of the criticisms attributed to peer review might reflect wider issues within academia and wider society, and future care will be required in order to carefully demarcate and address these.

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"Next Generation Library Publishing Partnership Awarded $2.2m from Arcadia to Improve Scholarly Publishing Infrastructures"

The Educopia Institute has released "Next Generation Library Publishing Partnership Awarded $2.2m from Arcadia to Improve Scholarly Publishing Infrastructures."

Here's an excerpt:

Through this project, Educopia and its partner institutions—California Digital Library (CDL), Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), Longleaf Services, LYRASIS, and Strategies for Open Science (Stratos)—will provide new publishing pathways for authors, editors, and readers by advancing and integrating open source publishing infrastructure to provide robust support for library publishing.

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"Open Up: A Survey on Open and Non-anonymized Peer Reviewing"

Lonni Besançon et al. have self-archived "Open Up: A Survey on Open and Non-anonymized Peer Reviewing."

Here's an excerpt:

We present a discussion and analysis regarding the benefits and limitations of open and non-anonymized peer review based on literature results and responses to a survey on the reviewing process of alt.chi, a more or less open-review track within the CHI conference, the predominant conference in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). This track currently is the only implementation of an open-peer-review process in the field of HCI while, with the recent increase in interest in open science practices, open review is now being considered and used in other fields. We collected 30 responses from alt.chi authors and reviewers and found that, while the benefits are quite clear and the system is generally well liked by alt.chi participants, they are reluctant to see it used in other venues. This concurs with a number of recent studies that suggest a divergence between support for a more open review process and its practical implementation.

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"cOAlition S Appoints Johan Rooryck as Open Access Champion"

cOAlition S has released "cOAlition S Appoints Johan Rooryck as Open Access Champion."

Here's an excerpt:

In his role as Open Access Champion, Rooryck will represent cOAlition S in meetings with external stakeholders including funders, researchers, librarians, and publishers. He will present Plan S, listen to concerns, and develop plans to help participants adapt to a changing publishing landscape. He will also advise cOAlition S on the ways to implement the transition to full and immediate Open Access as smoothly as possible. . . .

He is Professor of French Linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. . . .

He has over 20 years' experience as an editor, first as the Executive Editor of Lingua (Elsevier) and since 2015 as the founder and Editor in Chief of the Fair Open Access journal Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. He is President of the Quality Open Access Market (QOAM), founding member and President of the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), founding member of Mathematics in Open Access (MathOA) and Psychology in Open Access (PsyOA), founding member and President of Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), and Member of the Academia Europaea.

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"Citation Advantage for Open Access Articles in European Radiology"

Rayan H. M. Alkhawtani et al. have published "Citation Advantage for Open Access Articles in European Radiology" in .

Here's an excerpt:

The results of our study show that open access articles in European Radiology are significantly and independently more frequently cited than subscription access articles. This can be explained by the facts that open access by definition does not require a journal subscription or payment of a fee to read the article, open access offers potentially faster and easier article access even to subscribers because there is no need to login, and open access articles are also published in PubMed Central, which improves article visibility. Altogether, this may increase the number of article reads and subsequent citations.

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"A Crisis in "Open Access": Should Communication Scholarly Outputs Take 77 Years to Become Open Access?"

Abbas Ghanbari Baghestan et al. have published ";A Crisis in "Open Access": Should Communication Scholarly Outputs Take 77 Years to Become Open Access?" in SAGE Open.

Here's an excerpt:

This study diachronically investigates the trend of the "open access" in the Web of Science (WoS) category of "communication." To evaluate the trend, data were collected from 184 categories of WoS from 1980 to 2017. A total of 87,997,893 documents were obtained, of which 95,304 (0.10%) were in the category of "communication." In average, 4.24% of the documents in all 184 categories were open access. While in communication, it was 3.29%, which ranked communication 116 out of 184. An Open Access Index (OAI) was developed to predict the trend of open access in communication. Based on the OAI, communication needs 77 years to fully reach open access, which undeniably can be considered as “crisis in scientific publishing” in this field. Given this stunning information, it is the time for a global call for "open access" by communication scholars across the world. Future research should investigate whether the current business models of publications in communication scholarships are encouraging open access or pose unnecessary restrictions on knowledge development.

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"Ten Years of Research on ResearchGate, a Scoping Review Using Google Scholar 2008-2017"

Juan Jose Prieto-Gutierrez has self-archived "Ten Years of Research on ResearchGate, a Scoping Review Using Google Scholar 2008-2017."

Here's an excerpt:

Objective. To analyse quantitatively the articles published during 2008_2017 about the academic social networking site ResearchGate. Methods. A scoping bibliometric review of documents retrieved using Google Scholar was conducted, limited to publications that contained the word "ResearchGate" in their title and were published from 2008 to 2017. Results. The search yielded 159 documents, once a preliminary list of 386 documents retrieved from Google Scholar was filtered, which eliminated about 60% of the results that were bibliographic citations and not documents. Papers in journals were the most numerous type of documents (n 73; 46%), followed by conference papers (n 31; 19.5 %). Contributing eight publications, two Spanish scholars (Delgado Lopez-Cozar and Orduna Malea, who were coauthors in each case) were the most prolific authors writing on this topic during the ten-year period. The keywords most used in the documents were "ResearchGate" and "Altmetrics". The publications were cited frequently since 2014 (more than 90% of the total cites fell in that period), and those with more than one author were the most cited ones. The authors of the documents were mainly librarians and information science professionals, who wrote primarily as co-authors with colleagues from their own institutions, mostly published in English. Conclusions. Interest in ResearchGate has grown since 2015, as evident from the number of articles published and the citations they received.

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"Decentralising Scientific Publishing: Can the Blockchain Improve Science Communication?"

Flávio Codeço Coelho and Adeilton Brandão have published "Decentralising Scientific Publishing: Can the Blockchain Improve Science Communication?" in Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz.

Here's an excerpt:

We present a decentralised solution for managing scientific communication, based on distributed ledger technologies, also called blockchains. The proposed system aims to solve incentive problems displayed by traditional systems in scientific communication and publication. A minimal working model is presented, defining roles, processes, and expected results from the novel system. The proposed solution is viable, given the current status of blockchain technology, and should lead to a rethinking of current practices and their consequences for scientific communication.

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"Is Scholarly Publishing Like Rock and Roll?"

David W. Lewis has self-archived "Is Scholarly Publishing Like Rock and Roll?"

Here's an excerpt:

This article uses Alan B. Krueger's analysis of the music industry in his book Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life as a lens to consider the structure of scholarly publishing and what could happen to scholarly publishing going forward. Both the music industry and scholarly publishing are facing disruption as their products become digital. Digital content provides opportunities to a create a better product at lower prices and in the music industry this has happened. Scholarly publishing has not yet done so. Similarities and differences between the music industry and scholarly publishing will be considered. Like music, scholarly publishing appears to be a superstar industry. Both music and scholarly publishing are subject to piracy, which threatens revenue, though Napster was a greater disrupter than Sci-Hub seems to be. It also appears that for a variety of reasons market forces are not effective in driving changes in business models and practices in scholarly publishing, at least not at the rate we would expect given the changes in technology. After reviewing similarities and differences, the prospects for the future of scholarly publishing will be considered.

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"Fitting the Mould—What the European Commission’s Second Tender for an Open Research Publishing Platform Tells Us about the Future of Scholarly Communication"

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/08/20/fitting-the-mould-what-the-european-commissions-second-tender-for-an-open-research-publishing-platform-tells-us-about-the-future-of-scholarly-communication/

"medRxiv to PLOS: Direct Preprint Transfers"

PLOS has released "medRxiv to PLOS: Direct Preprint Transfers."

Here's an excerpt:

Authors with preprints on the new health sciences preprint server medRxiv now have the option to transfer their manuscripts for publication consideration at relevant PLOS journals in the topic area, PLOS Medicine, PLOS NTDs, or PLOS ONE. PLOS is excited to be among the first publishers to offer direct transfer service from the new server.

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"British Ecological Society Launches Large-Scale Study to Test Whether ‘Blinding’ Reduces Bias in Science Publishing"

The British Ecological Society has released "British Ecological Society Launches Large-Scale Study to Test Whether 'Blinding' Reduces Bias in Science Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

A two-year randomised controlled trial in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology will be the largest of its kind to date to assess whether hiding author details during peer review reduces bias against underrepresented groups in the science publishing process.

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"In Open Access’s Long Shadow—A View from the Humanities"

Enrico Natale has published "In Open Access's Long Shadow—A View from the Humanities" in 027.7 Zeitschrift für Bibliothekskultur / Journal for Library Culture.

Here's an excerpt:

Historians have been in recent years among the most vocal critics against open access to scientific literature. Discussing the controversies they have triggered in Europe and in the USA, we argue that research on open access should be broadened chronologically and thematically. The first section recalls the very first debate on open access that took place among library professionals at the turn of the XXth century and points similarities with the present situation. The second section reviews the criticisms levelled by humanities disciplines against mandatory regulations on open access. The third section argues that the potential of open access for science democratization and knowledge dissemination may not be taken for granted and need further empirical assessment.

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"Projekt Deal and Springer Nature Reach Understanding on World´s Largest Transformative Open Access Agreement"

The German Rectors' Conference (HRK) has released "Projekt Deal and Springer Nature Reach Understanding on World´s Largest Transformative Open Access Agreement."

Here's an excerpt:

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed today between MPDL Services, on behalf of Projekt DEAL, and Springer Nature sets the scene for the world’s most comprehensive open access (OA) agreement to be finalised later this year. . . .

The transformative two-part agreement will encompass a fully OA element and a Publish and Read (PAR) element. This will enable eligible authors to publish OA in both Springer Nature’s fully OA journals, the largest OA portfolio in the world with over 600 titles, and Springer Nature’s collection of 1,900 hybrid journals, which collectively already publish one in four of all OA articles. In addition, the model provides the academic community of the participating institutions with permanent reading access to content in Springer, Palgrave, Adis, and Macmillan academic journals published during the term of the contract.

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