Category: Scholarly Journals

"Academic Review Promotion and Tenure Documents Promote a View of Open Access That Is at Odds with the Wider Academic Community"

Juan Pablo Alperin, Esteban Morales and Erin McKiernan have published "Academic Review Promotion and Tenure Documents Promote a View of Open Access That Is at Odds with the Wider Academic Community" in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

In a recent study, analysing documents related to the review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process at a representative set of 129 universities from the United States and Canada, only 5% of institutions mentioned Open Access. Just as fascinating as this lack of interest and support for making research OA, however, were the misconceptions we found surrounding the term itself. For example one document cautioned faculty against "publishing in journals that are widely considered to be predatory open access journals". Others equated OA with materials that are "self-published, inadequately refereed, open-access writing."

Given that the documents that govern the RPT process embed these misconceptions and false associations, we wanted to know how faculty themselves thought about OA. Do faculty commonly associate OA with low-quality, non-refereed, predatory content?

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"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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