Category: E-Prints

Accelerating Scholarly Communication: The Transformative Role of Preprints

Knowledge Exchange has released "Accelerating Scholarly Communication: The Transformative Role of Preprints."

Here's an excerpt:

Knowledge Exchange, a group of national organisations from six European countries, commissioned and co-designed this study as part of their work on digital infrastructures to enable open scholarship. This report investigates the preprints landscape: it highlights current thinking in this dynamic area and makes recommendations for future work.

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"Peerj Preprints to Stop Accepting New Preprints Sep 30th 2019"

PeerJ has released "Peerj Preprints to Stop Accepting New Preprints Sep 30th 2019."

Here's an excerpt:

We started the PeerJ organization primarily to provide a superior peer-reviewed experience shaped by its Academic Editors. A secondary goal was to bring preprints back to biology. As the community's appetite for preprints has now been cemented, we too want to focus our efforts more fully on our portfolio of peer-reviewed journals and primary mission. While PeerJ Preprints has been successful and pioneering, the academic community is now well-served with other preprint venue options (and new ones are continuously being created to fill necessary areas, many of which are not tied so closely to a specific publication).

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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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"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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"Evolution of an Institutional Repository: A Case History from Nebraska"

Paul Royster has self-archived "Evolution of an Institutional Repository: A Case History from Nebraska."

Here's an excerpt:

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy. Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support. Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time. A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

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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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"Springer Nature Journals Unify Their Policy to Encourage Preprint Sharing"

Springer Nature has released "Springer Nature Journals Unify Their Policy to Encourage Preprint Sharing."

Here's an excerpt:

Recognizing these benefits, we are now pleased to announce an updated policy encouraging preprint sharing for Springer Nature journals. This intends to remove ambiguity on two important points. First, we now make it clear that authors may choose any licence for preprints, including Creative Commons licences. . . .

Second, the updated policy provides more information about our position on author engagement with the media in response to enquiries about preprints. . . .Finally, we stand by our policy supporting citation of preprints in reference lists of submitted and published manuscripts.

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"Meta-Research: Tracking the Popularity and Outcomes of All bioRxiv Preprints"

Richard J Abdill and Ran Blekhman have self-archived "Meta-Research: Tracking the Popularity and Outcomes of All bioRxiv Preprints."

Here's an excerpt:

The growth of preprints in the life sciences has been reported widely and is driving policy changes for journals and funders, but little quantitative information has been published about preprint usage. Here, we report how we collected and analyzed data on all 37,648 preprints uploaded to bioRxiv.org, the largest biology-focused preprint server, in its first five years. The rate of preprint uploads to bioRxiv continues to grow (exceeding 2,100 in October 2018), as does the number of downloads (1.1 million in October 2018). We also find that two-thirds of preprints posted before 2017 were later published in peer-reviewed journals, and find a relationship between the number of downloads a preprint has received and the impact factor of the journal in which it is published. We also describe Rxivist.org, a web application that provides multiple ways to interact with preprint metadata.

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"arXiv and the Symbiosis of Physics Preprints and Journal Review Articles: A Model"

Brian Simboli has self-archived "arXiv and the Symbiosis of Physics Preprints and Journal Review Articles: A Model."

Here's an excerpt:

This paper recommends a publishing model that can help achieve the goal of reforming physics publishing. It distinguishes two complementary needs in scholarly communication. Preprints, increasingly important in science, are properly the vehicle for claiming priority of discovery and for eliciting feedback that will help with versioning. Traditional journal publishing, however, should focus on providing synthesis in the form of overlay journals that play the same role as review articles.

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"The Next Stage of SocArXiv’s Development: Bringing Greater Transparency and Efficiency to the Peer Review Process"

Philip Cohen has published "The Next Stage of SocArXiv's Development: Bringing Greater Transparency and Efficiency to the Peer Review Proces" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

Looking ahead to the next stage of its development, Philip Cohen considers how SocArXiv might challenge the peer review system to be more efficient and transparent, firstly by confronting the bias that leads many who benefit from the status quo to characterise mooted alternatives as extreme. The value and implications of openness at the various decision points in the system must be debated, as should potentially more disruptive innovations such as non-exclusive review and publication or crowdsourcing reviews.

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Coalition for Responsible Sharing’s Statement: "Publishers and Societies Take Action against ResearchGate’s Copyright Infringements"

The Coalition for Responsible Sharing has released "Publishers and Societies Take Action against ResearchGate’s Copyright Infringements."

Here's an excerpt:

Numerous attempts to agree with ResearchGate on amicable solutions, including signing up to the Voluntary Principles of Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks and implementing a user-friendly technical solution, remained unsuccessful. Members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing are therefore now resorting to formal means to alter ResearchGate's damaging practices. The coalition members include the American Chemical Society, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer. These organizations will begin to issue takedown notices to ResearchGate requesting that infringing content be removed from the site. Concurrently, The American Chemical Society and Elsevier are asking the courts to clarify ResearchGate's copyright responsibility.

See also: "ResearchGate: Publishers Take Formal Steps to Force Copyright Compliance."

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"The Prehistory of Biology Preprints: A Forgotten Experiment from the 1960s"

Matthew Cobb has self-archived "The Prehistory of Biology Preprints: A Forgotten Experiment from the 1960s."

Here's an excerpt:

In 1961, the NIH began to circulate biological preprints in a forgotten experiment called the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs). This system eventually attracted over 3600 participants and saw the production of over 2,500 different documents, but by 1967 it was effectively shut down by journal publishers’ refusal to accept articles that had been circulated as preprints. This article charts the rise and fall of the IEGs and explores the parallels with the 1990s and the biomedical preprint movement of today.

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"Reflections on ‘Elsevier Acquires bepress’: Implications for Library Leaders"

Roger C. Schonfeld has published "Reflections on 'Elsevier Acquires bepress': Implications for Library Leaders" in the Ithaka S+R blog

Here's an excerpt:

If this is the case, libraries adopting standalone institutional repositories are moving in exactly the wrong direction strategically. Instead, thinking more in terms of a workflow as are Elsevier and the Open Science Framework (and to some degree Digital Science) may be the strongest strategy. If this is so, then the urgent question facing institutional repository managers and strategists is how quickly and thoroughly they can integrate into one (or more) such workflows. And, while such integration may not require the kind of platform-first multi-tenant approach to repositories that Digital Commons and OSF Preprints each seems to have developed, it seems like a strong design approach.

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"Elsevier Acquires bepress"

Roger C. Schonfeld has published "Elsevier Acquires bepress" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, Elsevier announces its acquisition of bepress. In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing to preprints, analytics, workflow, and decision-support, Elsevier is now a major if not the foremost single player in the institutional repository landscape.

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"Copyright Compliance and Infringement in ResearchGate Full-Text Journal Articles"

Hamid R. Jamali has self-archived "Copyright Compliance and Infringement in ResearchGate Full-Text Journal Articles."

Here's an excerpt:

This study aims to investigate the extent to which ResearchGate members as authors of journal articles comply with publishers' copyright policies when they self-archive full-text of their articles on ResearchGate. . . . The key finding was that 201 (51.3%) out of 392 non-OA articles infringed the copyright and were non-compliant with publishers' policy. While 88.3% of journals allowed some form of self-archiving (SHERPA/RoMEO green, blue or yellow journals), the majority of non-compliant cases (97.5%) occurred when authors self-archived publishers' PDF files (final published version).

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