Category: Scholarly Journals

"Bringing Transparent Peer Review to the Physical Sciences and Beyond"

Clarivate Analytics has released "Bringing Transparent Peer Review to the Physical Sciences and Beyond."

Here's an excerpt:

Publons and ScholarOne, both part of the Web of Science Group (a Clarivate Analytics company), have entered into a new partnership with IOP Publishing to introduce the industry's first cross-publisher, scalable transparent peer review workflows across some of their leading journals in the physical sciences and beyond. . . .

The new workflows ensure that, alongside the published article, readers can access a comprehensive peer review history, including reviewer reports, editor decision letters and authors' responses. Each of these elements is assigned its own digital object identifier (DOI), which helps readers easily reference and cite the peer review content. Transparency may increase the quality of the peer review process, and can also aid teaching of best practice in peer review.

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"Peer Review: Further Results from a Trial at eLife"

eLife has released "Peer Review: Further Results from a Trial at eLife."

Here's an excerpt:

In January, we described some initial results (see Peer review: First results from a trial at eLife). Of the 313 submissions, 70 (22.4%) were encouraged for in-depth peer review. We noted that this "encouragement rate" was higher for late-career researchers compared to their early- and mid-career colleagues. We also observed that encouragement rates were similar for male and female last authors in the trial process.

We will now summarise some re-analysis of the initial decision step, and the results of the peer-review process itself for the 70 trial papers sent for in-depth review and for 162 papers that went through the regular review process during the same period. We are planning to present the final outcomes of the trial at a later date.

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"Do Download Reports Reliably Measure Journal Usage? Trusting the Fox to Count Your Hens?"

Alex Wood-Doughty, Ted Bergstrom, and Douglas G. Steigerwald have published "Do Download Reports Reliably Measure Journal Usage? Trusting the Fox to Count Your Hens?" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately measure local usage, there is a strong case for using them to compare the cost-effectiveness of journal subscriptions. We examine data for nearly 8,000 journals downloaded at the ten universities in the University of California system during a period of six years. We find that controlling for number of articles, publisher, and year of download, the ratio of downloads to citations differs substantially among academic disciplines. After adding academic disciplines to the control variables, there remain substantial “publisher effects”, with some publishers reporting significantly more downloads than would be predicted by the characteristics of their journals. These cross-publisher differences suggest that the currently available download statistics, which are supplied by publishers, are not sufficiently reliable to allow libraries to make subscription decisions based on price and reported downloads, at least without making an adjustment for publisher effects in download reports.

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"Publication Modalities ‘Article in Press’ and ‘Open Access’ in Relation to Journal Average Citation"

Sara M. González-Betancor and Pablo Dorta-González have self-archived "Publication Modalities 'Article in Press' and 'Open Access' in Relation to Journal Average Citation."

Here's an excerpt:

There has been a generalization in the use of two publication practices by scientific journals during the past decade: 1. 'article in press' or early view, which allows access to the accepted paper before its formal publication in an issue; 2. 'open access', which allows readers to obtain it freely and free of charge. This paper studies the influence of both publication modalities on the average impact of the journal and its evolution over time. It tries to identify the separate effect of access on citation into two major parts: early view and selection effect, managing to provide some evidence of the positive effect of both. Scopus is used as the database and CiteScore as the measure of journal impact. The prevalence of both publication modalities is quantified. Differences in the average impact factor of group of journals, according to their publication modalities, are tested. The evolution over time of the citation influence, from 2011 to 2016, is also analysed. Finally, a linear regression to explain the correlation of these publication practices with the CiteScore in 2016, in a ceteris paribus context, is estimated. Our main findings show evidence of a positive correlation between average journal impact and advancing the publication of accepted articles, moreover this correlation increases over time. The open access modality, in a ceteris paribus context, also correlates positively with average journal impact.

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"The Citation Advantage of Linking Publications to Research Data"

Giovanni Colavizza et al. have self-archived "The Citation Advantage of Linking Publications to Research Data."

Here's an excerpt:

We consider 531,889 journal articles published by PLOS and BMC which are part of the PubMed Open Access collection, categorize their data availability statements according to their content and analyze the citation advantage of different statement categories via regression. We find that, following mandated publisher policies, data availability statements have become common by now, yet statements containing a link to a repository are still just a fraction of the total. We also find that articles with these statements, in particular, can have up to 25.36% higher citation impact on average: an encouraging result for all publishers and authors who make the effort of sharing their data.

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"Preprints and Scholarly Communication: Adoption, Practices, Drivers and Barriers"

Andrea Chiarelli have published "Preprints and Scholarly Communication: Adoption, Practices, Drivers and Barriers" in F1000Research (awaiting peer review).

Here's an excerpt:

Background: Since 2013, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of preprint servers available online. To date, little is known about the position of researchers, funders, research performing organisations and other stakeholders with respect to this fast-paced landscape. In this article, we explore the benefits and challenges of preprint posting, along with issues such as infrastructure and financial sustainability. We also discuss the definition of a 'preprint' in different communities, and the impact this has on further uptake.

Methods: This study is based on 38 detailed semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders based on a purposive heterogeneous sampling approach. Interviews were undertaken between October 2018 and January 2019. These were recorded, transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis to identify trends. Interview questions were designed based on Innovation Diffusion Theory, which is also used to interpret the results of this study. Results: Our study is the first using empirical data to understand the new wave of preprint servers and found that early and fast dissemination is the most appealing feature of the practice. The main concerns are related to the lack of quality assurance and the 'Ingelfinger rule'. We identified trust as an essential enabler of preprint posting and stress the enabling role of Twitter in showcasing preprints and enabling comments on these.

Conclusions: The preprints landscape is evolving fast and disciplinary communities are at different stages in the innovation diffusion process. The landscape is characterised by significant experimentation, which leads to the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all approach to preprints is not feasible. Cooperation and active engagement between the stakeholders involved will play an important role in the future. In our paper, we share questions for the further development of the preprints landscape, with the most important being whether preprint posting will develop as a publisher- or researcher-centric practice.

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