Scholarly Communication – Page 2

"’On the Ruins of Seriality’: The Scientific Journal and the Nature of the Scientific Life"

The serialization of scientific print began around 1800 as an effort to challenge elite science and to make knowledge accessible to broader publics. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scientific journal developed into the central institution of knowledge legitimization, bound up with discourses of objectivity, vocational dedication, and communal virtue. Since the last few decades, however, the journal has been at the heart of crisis narratives that warn of the erosion of science’s moral basis and creative capacity. Competition, careerism, and perverse incentives—reflected in and produced by the serial format—have left the scientific self without a sense of calling, the "scientific community" without a sense of community, and the general public of science without a sense of trust. Twenty-first-century science finds itself "on the ruins of seriality" (Lerner, 2015, p. 132).

Yet there have hardly been any attempts to reimagine scholarly communication without the journal in a central position.²⁴ Notwithstanding vigorous debate on its (de)merits and intense experimentation with peer review and open publishing platforms, the scientific journal has proven to be a "sticky" institution. . . . And although in the digital world the journal’s constitutive nature as a serial format is becoming less and less relevant, it is still primarily the paper—as the base unit of scientific publication—that conditions the modalities of scientific research, writing, and reading, and orients conceptions of scholarly selfhood in both the scientific and the general culture.

The commercial publishers have also demonstrated their stickiness. The open access movement has posed a serious challenge, but all in all the publishing companies have been able to integrate demands for "openness" into their business models (just as the scientific societies were able to adapt to the rise of commercial publishing in the postwar period). . . . So, despite predictions that "networked brains" would revolutionize scientific communication and produce "an unprecedented public good" (Guédon, 2017), open access has essentially come to mean "pay to publish," that is, a return to the situation before the ascendancy of the subscription journal (see also Noel, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2023.100885

Librarian – Electronic Resources at Western New Mexico University

Investigates, recommends, implements, manages, and troubleshoots access to electronic library resources, including databases, e-books, and other applications. Ensures that electronic resources maintain compatibility with existing library systems.

Establishes and maintains relationships with vendors to learn about relevant new products and services.

https://wnmu.peopleadmin.com/postings/1595

Information Specialist – Open Science at University of Texas at San Antonio

Provide research and instruction services to students and faculty in STEM areas advancing student success and research excellence at UTSA with a focus on open science, reproducible research principles, measuring, and communicating research impact

https://tinyurl.com/ynvam6zv

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts:

What is Scholarly Communication?

Scholarly Communication and Open Culture

Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies

The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

"AI Will Lead Us to Need More Garbage-subtraction"

If submission rates increase because more papers are being written with the support of generative AI systems, then the problems of editorial review will only multiply. Probably, these new papers will find some publication home in some journal or find their way into some pre-print repository. This increase in the average amount of content produced per researcher could increase the potential of having some great new discovery. Unfortunately, it will probably just be more content overall. The act of selection and curation will be increasingly more valuable, because the volume of content will overwhelm practically every field and every subdomain.

https://tinyurl.com/2rxah6x7

"Where Is All the Research Software? An Analysis of Software in UK Academic Repositories"

This research examines the prevalence of research software as independent records of output within UK academic institutional repositories (IRs). There has been a steep decline in numbers of research software submissions to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework from 2008 to 2021, but there has been no investigation into whether and how the official academic IRs have affected the low return rates. In what we believe to be the first such census of its kind, we queried the 182 online repositories of 157 UK universities. Our findings show that the prevalence of software within UK Academic IRs is incredibly low. Fewer than 28% contain software as recognised academic output. Of greater concern, we found that over 63% of repositories do not currently record software as a type of research output and that several Universities appeared to have removed software as a defined type from default settings of their repository. We also explored potential correlations, such as being a member of the Russell group, but found no correlation between these metadata and prevalence of records of software. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings with regards to the lack of recognition of software as a discrete research output in institutions, despite the opposite being mandated by funders, and we make recommendations for changes in policies and operating procedures.

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1546

Zenodo Mandates Document Submission to a Community and Peer Review

What’s more, content submitted to Zenodo would be published automatically within the repository before and whether or not it was accepted into a community. Now, when a researcher goes to publish their outputs, they must select their community and submit their work for peer review, before it is made public. Community curators will then review the content to see if it fits within the community even have the capability to improve and correct the metadata to ensure that it meets quality standards. Once the metadata is approved, it will then be published in Zenodo and, consequently, integrated into the OpenAIRE Graph.

https://tinyurl.com/5y79y2nb

Paywall: "Trends in Research Impact Librarianship: Developing a New Program and Services"

Research impact librarianship is an area within the profession that continues to grow out of need for dedicated expertise of bibliometrics and other various assessment measures.. . . The Libraries at the University of Houston is in the midst of creating a research visibility and impact program born out of an initiative to elevate the university’s level of prestige and impact by developing personnel, programs, and practices to support research visibility and impact across the institution. This article discusses the University of Houston Libraries’ process and progress toward formalizing research impact services.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2023.2262364

Digital Library Developer at University of Kentucky

The University of Kentucky Libraries seeks applications for a Digital Library Developer. As a member of Web Technologies and Development, a unit of Digital Strategies and Technology, this position directly supports applications and services relating to the discovery, delivery, storage, and preservation of the University’s digital collections. Development duties relate to the creation, implementation, and support of software applications comprising the Libraries’ web applications, including software to assist in internal workflow and operations.

https://ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/495295

Octopus Publishing Platform: A Snapshot of the Academic Research Culture in 2023 and How It Might Be Improved

Our evaluation revealed a wide variety of barriers to more open sharing of research. While some are related to perceived or experienced biases based on personal characteristics such as gender or inequitable access to support, most result from a research culture that primarily assesses achievement and quality through traditional, peer-reviewed papers. This focus, and the resulting competition, encourages researchers to hide their work at least until a traditional journal paper is published. In some situations, these pressures lead to questionable research practices, such as data manipulation to achieve an "interesting" or statistically significant result more likely to appeal to a journal with higher impact metrics or perceived "impact". In general, open research practices are viewed as not beneficial, or even detrimental, to job security and career advancement. This is especially true given competing demands and the need for academics to prioritise their time on outputs that count in assessments that they are subject to.

https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.8165703

"Preprint Review Services: Disrupting the Scholarly Communication Landscape?"

The most important tension that we identified relates to anonymisation of reviewers and authors. In line with the ideas of the Democracy & Transparency school, preprint review services promote more open forms of peer review in which authors and reviewers participate on a more equal basis. However, from the perspective of the Equity & Inclusion school, this raises concerns. To make peer review processes more equitable and inclusiv e, this school emphasises the importance of enabling anonymisation of reviewers and possibly also authors, which is in tension with the focus on openness and transparency of preprint review services.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8c6xm

"Springer Nature Introduces Curie, Its AI-powered Scientific Writing Assistant"

Springer Nature today announced a new AI-powered in-house writing assistant to support researchers, particularly those whose first language is not English, in their scientific writing. . . .

It has been specifically trained on academic literature, spanning 447+ areas of study, more than 2,000 field-specific topics and on over 1 million edits on papers published including those in leading Nature journals. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with specialised AI digital editing developed in-house and designed specifically for scientific writing. Unlike generalist AI writing apps, Curie focuses on the unique pain points of researchers in their professional writing, including translation to English and English language editing to address grammatical errors and improve phrasing and word choice.

https://tinyurl.com/msvc28ra

"How ChatGPT and Other AI tools Could Disrupt Scientific Publishing"

In the age of LLMs, [Michael] Eisen pictures a future in which findings are published in an interactive, "paper on demand" format rather than as a static, one-size-fits-all product. In this model, users could use a generative AI tool to ask queries about the experiments, data and analyses, which would allow them to drill into the aspects of a study that are most relevant to them. It would also allow users to access a description of the results that is tailored to their needs. "I think it’s only a matter of time before we stop using single narratives as the interface between people and the results of scientific studies," says Eisen.

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03144-w

"IFLA ARL Section’s ‘Inclusiveness through Openness’ Conference Proceedings Now Available!"

All videos and slides from this August IFLA Academic & Research Libraries Section (ARL) Satellite conference to the 2023 WLIC in Rotterdam IFLA conference are now available:

https://tinyurl.com/4cywvp9h

"A Large Scale Perspective on Open Access Publishing: Examining Gender and Scientific Disciplines in 38 OECD countries"

Gender inequality is a persistent issue in scientific publishing. Recent studies suggest that Open Access (OA) publishing can increase the visibility and impact of female scientists’ research. Despite the growing acceptance of OA as a means of disseminating research results, there is a notable gap in studies focusing on the role of gender in OA publishing trends. The presented research offers a comprehensive analysis of OA publishing with a focus on gender differences and specific scientific disciplines in 38 OECD countries. Our study using the OpenAlex database included over 20 million publications from 1990-2021 and revealed that 39.3 percent of these were freely available in some form of OA. Results showed, over time, a decline in Bronze OA and Green OA but also an increase in Gold OA and, as of 2018, a rapid increase in Hybrid OA. The results also showed that females are more likely to publish in gold OA than males, both in cases of female-only authorship and mixed-gender authorship. Disciplinary analysis showed that Biology, Physics and Mathematics had the most OA publications. The results also showed the influence of major OA initiatives on publication trends. This study highlights the need for a more inclusive scientific publishing system that promotes gender equality and wider accessibility.

https://doi.org/10.55835/6442b2f80dd9c5d18e7caff8

"The Strain on Scientific Publishing"

Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was 47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884

"Toward Non-human-Centered Design: Designing an Academic Article with ChatGPT"

Non-human-centered design tools, such as ChatGPT, have shown potential as effective aids in academic article design. This study conducts a comparative evaluation of ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4, examining their capabilities and limitations in supporting the academic article design process. The study aims to demonstrate the utility of ChatGPT as a writing tool and investigate its applicability and efficacy in the context of academic paper design. The author interacted with both versions of ChatGPT, providing prompts and analyzing the generated responses. In addition, a different expert academic was consulted to assess the appropriateness of the ChatGPT responses. The findings suggest that ChatGPT, despite its limitations, could serve as a useful tool for academic writing, particularly in the design of academic articles. Despite the limitations of both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, GPT-3.5 offers a broader perspective, whereas GPT-4 provides a more in-depth and detailed approach to the design of articles. ChatGPT exhibits capabilities in aiding the design process, generating ideas aligned with the overall purpose and focus of the paper, producing consistent and contextually relevant responses to various natural language inputs, partially assisting in literature reviews, supporting paper design in terms of both content and format, and providing reasonable editing and proofreading for articles. However, limitations were identified, including reduced critical thinking, potential for plagiarism, risk of misinformation, lack of originality and innovation, and limited access to literature.

https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2023.sep.12

Head of Data Services at University of Massachusetts Amherst

In collaboration with Data Services librarians, the Scholarly Communication team, and liaison librarians, the Head of Data Services leads a dynamic and evolving team to develop and deliver forward-thinking, measurable, campus-aligned programming, resources, and services to support researchers at every stage of the data lifecycle; scaffold scalable education and outreach programming and support for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty; and coordinate project support for data-intensive research. They will assist University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers in meeting the data management and sharing requirements of funding agencies and publishers. They will prioritize the development of strong, collaborative relationships with library subject specialists in data-intensive disciplines and with relevant offices, departments, and centers across campus. The incumbent will manage a small team of specialists focused on data management, spatial data and GIS, open science, data science, and data visualization.

https://tinyurl.com/2dasnbfc

Harvard Library: "Yuan Li Appointed University Scholarly Communication Officer"

Yuan comes to Harvard from Princeton, where she served as the Scholarly Communications Librarian, leading and managing Princeton University Library’s efforts in scholarly communication innovations and reforms. During her tenure she established the Scholarly Communications Office and launched several open-access programs and services, including the Princeton Open Access Repository, Princeton Open Access Publication Fund Program, Princeton Open Access Publishing Program, and PUL Copyright Services. She also helped establish the groundwork for Princeton Research Data Services, which evolved into a robust program that provides data curation, data education, and open data services. . . .

She holds a master’s degree in library science and information studies from the University of Rhode Island, a master’s degree in computer science from the National Computer System Engineering Research Institute of China, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Yanshan University in Qinhuangdao, China. Additionally, she is currently pursuing a PhD in organizational leadership from Liberty University.

https://tinyurl.com/2j9r3yfh

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

The book consists of three parts. Part I offers definitions of scholarly communication and scholarly communication librarianship and provides an introduction to the social, economic, technological, and policy/legal pressures that underpin and shape scholarly communication work in libraries. These pressures, which have framed ACRL’s understanding of scholarly communication for the better part of the past two decades, have unsettled many foundational assumptions and practices in the field, removing core pillars of scholarly communication as it was practiced in the twentieth century. These pressures have also cleared fresh ground, and scholarly communication practitioners have begun to seed the space with values and practices designed to renew and often improve the field. Part II begins with an introduction to "open," the core response to the pressures described in part I. This part offers a general overview of the idea of openness in scholarly communication followed by chapters on different permutations and practices of open, each edited by a recognized expert of these areas with authors of their selection. Amy Buckland edited chapter 2.1, "Open Access." Brianna Marshall edited chapter 2.2, "Open Data." Lillian Hogendoorn edited chapter 2.3, "Open Education." Micah Vandegrift edited chapter 2.4, "Open Science and Infrastructure." Each of them brought on incredible expertise through contributors whom they identified, through both original contributions and repurposing existing openly licensed work, which is something we want to model where possible. Part III consists of twenty-four concise perspectives, intersections, and case studies from practicing librarians and closely related stakeholders, which we hope will stimulate discussion and reflection on theory and implications for practice. In every single case, we’re really excited by the editors and authors and the ideas they bring to the whole. Each contribution features light pedagogical apparatuses like suggested further reading, discussion or reflection prompts, and potential activities. It’s all available for free and openly licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so anyone is encouraged to grab whatever parts are useful and to adapt and repurpose and improve them to meet specific course goals and student needs within the confines of the license.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

Reviewed Preprints Published Change: "eLife New Model at Six Months: An ICOR analysis"

Submissions are steady, and the proportion of papers sent for review is similar in the two models.

Reviewed Preprints are visible earlier than traditionally peer-reviewed articles, which provides a middle ground between unreviewed preprints and published VORs.

Author demographics have not changed significantly with regard to discipline or geography.

Authors, Senior Editors, and Reviewing Editors are reporting largely favorable experiences with the new model, with some concerns about quality and suggestions regarding process being voiced.

https://tinyurl.com/3u9w46fe

"A Critical Examination of the Ethics of AI-Mediated Peer Review"

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including large language models like ChatGPT, offer promise and peril for scholarly peer review. On the one hand, AI can enhance efficiency by addressing issues like long publication delays. On the other hand, it brings ethical and social concerns that could compromise the integrity of the peer review process and outcomes. However, human peer review systems are also fraught with related problems, such as biases, abuses, and a lack of transparency, which already diminish credibility. While there is increasing attention to the use of AI in peer review, discussions revolve mainly around plagiarism and authorship in academic journal publishing, ignoring the broader epistemic, social, cultural, and societal epistemic in which peer review is positioned. . . . The discussion here emphasizes the need to critically assess the legitimacy of AI-driven peer review, addressing the benefits and downsides relative to the broader epistemic, social, ethical, and regulatory factors that sculpt its implementation and impact.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12356

"ChatGPT Users Can Now Browse Internet, OpenAI Says"

ChatGPT users will now be able to surf the web, Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI said on Wednesday, expanding the data the viral chatbot can access beyond its earlier September 2021 cutoff.

The artificial intelligence startup said its latest browsing feature would allow websites to control how ChatGPT can interact with them. . . .

The startup also announced a major update earlier this week that would enable ChatGPT to have voice conversations with users and interact with them using images, moving it closer to popular AI assistants like Apple’s (AAPL.O) Siri.

https://tinyurl.com/yckddzzm

Critical Systems Analyst, Sr. at New Mexico State University

Reporting to the Head of Systems, the Critical Systems Analyst, Sr. is charged with serving as the platform owner and administrator for critical platforms and systems as designated by the Head of Systems. The Critical Systems Analyst, Sr. shall be responsible those updates, upgrades, and general maintenance operations on these systems that are not the responsibility of the vendor. It shall be the responsibility of the Critical Systems Analyst, Sr. to keep the Head of Systems informed of any upcoming maintenance on such platforms. The Critical Systems Analyst, Sr. is also charged with collaborating with other departments to provide tech support for changes they wish to make within critical systems while ensuring any changes have gone through the appropriate change management procedure before being instantiated in production.

https://tinyurl.com/2c5mve4y

"You Do Not Receive Enough Recognition for Your Influential Science"

During career advancement and funding allocation decisions in biomedicine, reviewers have traditionally depended on journal-level measures of scientific influence like the impact factor. Prestigious journals are thought to pursue a reputation of exclusivity by rejecting large quantities of papers, many of which may be meritorious. It is possible that this process could create a system whereby some influential articles are prospectively identified and recognized by journal brands but most influential articles are overlooked. Here, we measure the degree to which journal prestige hierarchies capture or overlook influential science. We quantify the fraction of scientists’ articles that would receive recognition because (a) they are published in journals above a chosen impact factor threshold, or (b) are at least as well-cited as articles appearing in such journals. We find that the number of papers cited at least as well as those appearing in high-impact factor journals vastly exceeds the number of papers published in such venues. At the investigator level, this phenomenon extends across gender, racial, and career stage groupings of scientists. We also find that approximately half of researchers never publish in a venue with an impact factor above 15, which under journal-level evaluation regimes may exclude them from consideration for opportunities. Many of these researchers publish equally influential work, however, raising the possibility that the traditionally chosen journal-level measures that are routinely considered under decision-making norms, policy, or law, may recognize as little as 10-20% of the work that warrants recognition.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.07.556750

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |