FR

Les effets ambivalents de l’IA sur les marges féminisées de la chaîne éditoriale scientifique. Le cas des traductrices et éditrices de sciences humaines et sociales

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Autrice : Lison Burlat

Cet article interroge les effets ambivalents du déploiement, en France, de l’intelligence artificielle générative (IAg) sur deux activités professionnelles féminisées de « soutien à la recherche » : la traduction et l’édition de sciences humaines et sociales. Il s’inscrit dans une perspective croisant les travaux de sociologie des professions et du travail féminin face aux technologies et ceux de la traductologie féministe.

Une première partie souligne que l’IAg révèle des luttes de juridiction préexistantes entre chercheur·ses, éditrices et traductrices, à replacer dans un contexte socio-économique spécifique. Une seconde partie montre qu’éditrices et traductrices ne défendent pas à armes égales leur territoire professionnel dans ce contexte.

Le premier groupe, plus structuré, entend se saisir de l’IAg pour requalifier son activité. Le second, plus fragmenté et soumis aux évolutions de la demande, est au contraire déqualifié par la relégation à la post-édition, voire est évacué de la chaîne.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3917/nqf.451.0069

EN

When AI Meets Science: Research Diversity, Interdisciplinarity, Visibility, and Retractions across Disciplines in a Global Surge

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Andrés F. Castro Torres, Joan Giner-Miguelez, Mercè Crosas

The extent to which Artificial Intelligence (AI) can trigger generalized paradigm shifts in science is unclear. Although some of these technologies have revolutionized data collection and analysis in specific scientific fields such as Chemistry, their overall impact depends on the scope of adoption and the ways scholars use them.

In this study, we document substantial differences in the timing and extent of AI adoption across countries and scientific domains from 1960 to 2015. After 2015, we find generalized exponential growth in AI adoption, with the number of AI-supported works multiplying by at least four across all domains. The transformative nature of this rapid growth is less apparent and points to multiple challenges should adoption trends persist.

According to our analyses, AI-supported research is confined to very few topics with strong ties to Computer Science and conventional statistical frameworks, suggesting limited transformational potential in epistemological terms. AI-supported works are also associated with an unwarranted citation premium and exhibit substantially higher retraction rates than non-AI-supported works across most fields.

Geographically, AI adoption displays pronounced heterogeneity at the country level, along with an acceleration in the relevance of middle-income countries in Asia, from China and beyond.

Thus, the transformative capacity of AI in science remains largely untapped, and its rapid adoption underlines challenges in research openness, transparency, reproducibility, and ethics from a global perspective. We discuss how best research practices could boost the benefits of AI adoption and highlight fields and geographies where these trends warrant closer scrutiny.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.06033

EN

Co-funding networks as a new tool in research evaluation: a linked open data-based study of the Seventh Framework Programme projects

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Niliek Silva‑Alés, Antonio Perianes‑Rodríguez

There is a growing interest in studying the influence of funding on scientific progress. Through exploration of the connections between funding acknowledgements (FAs), which link research results to funding sources, science communication processes can be understood and their influence in the international context can be evaluated.

Such analyses become more complex when the projects involved have two or more funding sources. This study examines FAs that mention the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and tries to achieve a broader, fuller, more singular view than previous studies of FP7 by visualising co-funding networks and conducting a structural analysis of inter-agency relationships.

This is done using open sources that have been linked after exhaustive data cleansing and harmonisation and the assignment of unique identifiers. Compliance with the objectives of the three most visible, most productive programmes is also examined, and the geographical distribution of the agencies participating in co-funding networks is evaluated.

One intriguing result shows that the number of projects with associated publications has risen 21% thanks to FAs. Considerable differences between programmes are also revealed: IDEAS-ERC is the programme with the highest number of co-funder’s, and HEALTH is the programme with the densest, most cohesive network.

Lastly, it is found that a stronger commitment is required from all the actors involved in the course of co-funding and publication to ensure that the funding data provided is of the right quality to facilitate accurate, transparent, useful, full evaluations.

URL : Co-funding networks as a new tool in research evaluation: a linked open data-based study of the Seventh Framework Programme projects

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-026-05653-7

EN

The Age of APCs: Corresponding Author Approaches to Article Processing Charges and Open Access

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Mitchell Scott, Ben Rawlins

Introduction

As open access and APCs reshape scholarly publishing, and with the University of Kentucky Libraries opting out of large transformative agreements (TA), this study explores how affiliated corresponding authors navigate APCs in relation to their personal, disciplinary, and institutional values.

Literature Review

The literature shows that faculty have mixed feelings about open access (OA) publishing, shaped by things like discipline, age, and concerns about quality and cost; but many are motivated by increased visibility and funder requirements, using a range of methods to cover APCs, from grants and institutional support to personal funds, with big differences across disciplines.

Methods

This study investigated how University of Kentucky-affiliated corresponding authors manage Article Processing Charges (APCs) and their perspectives on OA publishing through surveys and eight semistructured interviews with 383 unique authors identified from Scopus data for 2023–2024 OA publications.

Findings

Using Scopus to identify 383 University of Kentucky-affiliated corresponding authors of 2023– 2024 OA publications, this study explored how they manage APCs and view OA publishing through a survey and eight follow-up semistructured interviews.

Discussion

The discussion highlights key aspects of APC-driven OA, including authors’ experiences with paying for APCs, journals flipping to Gold OA, and difficulty with peer review, while also showing that the University of Kentucky is already spending significant funds on APCs. Conclusion: This study reveals corresponding authors’ conflicting views on transformative agreements, valued for easing APC burdens but seen as exploitative, while exposing funding inequities at the University of Kentucky and underscoring the need for a more coordinated OA strategy.

URL : The Age of APCs: Corresponding Author Approaches to Article Processing Charges and Open Access

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.20329

EN

Studying ‘predatory publishing’ in the context of research evaluation: conceptual and methodological challenges

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors :  Dimity Stephen, Meta Cramer, Emanuel Kulczycki, Martin Reinhart, Federico Vasen, Jakub Krzeski, Rita Fari, Moumita Koley, Marilena Drymioti

Over the past years, the phenomenon of ‘predatory publishing’ has undergone fundamental changes raising pressing methodological and conceptual challenges for its study, particularly in the context of research evaluation.

The complex constellation of commercial, evaluative, and scholarly actors and logics now involved necessitates an interdisciplinary, geographically-diverse, and collaborative approach to studying scholarly – and especially ‘predatory’ – publishing. In this piece, we outline four key conceptual and methodological dimensions that, we argue, scholars must account for when studying this phenomenon.

Firstly, the constantly changing dynamics of who and what constitutes predatory publishers and practices. Secondly, disentangling the complex relationships between evaluation and practice, accounting methodologically for the myriad factors that influence these ties, and recognising that scholarly practices are not a unidirectional effect of evaluations.

Thirdly, scholars must recognise that evaluation regimes are embedded in distinct political economies of academia and that the notion of predatoriness is not universal but culturally, methodologically, and institutionally contingent.

Finally, the common practice of using quantitative analyses alone to study questionable publishing practices risks reproducing existing biases and overlooking structural dynamics, and thus mixed approaches incorporating qualitative methods are necessary to ensure a nuanced understanding of the topic.

We argue that scholars’ approach to ‘predatory publishing’ crucially shapes what empirical dynamics are observed, and consequently call for scholars to take a holistic approach to studying this phenomenon.

URL : Studying ‘predatory publishing’ in the context of research evaluation: conceptual and methodological challenges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvag025

EN

Is the Scholarly System Breaking Down?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : David Nicholas, Eti Herman, John Akeroyd, Abdullah Abrizah, Marzena Swigon, Jorge Revez, Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo, Tatyana Polezhaeva

On the back of countless warnings that the scholarly system is seriously being threatened, indeed, upended by fraud, fakery and numerous bad practices, we set out to establish the extent to which this is true by asking the people who are, arguably, in the best position to know—early career researchers (ECRs).

This is because they are research workhorses operating very much at the frontline of research; there are around a million of them and they represent the future. To this end, a convenience sample of 62 international ECRs from several disciplines were depth-interviewed about bad and questionable practices and such like.

An extensive literature review was also conducted to provide a broader context for and an expansion of the interview data. It was found that the system is not totally broken, but breaking it certainly is. It is under pressure and changes, such as whitelists, local journals and national boards/policies, are all slow to come about while the fakers can work very quickly.

URL : Is the Scholarly System Breaking Down?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2060

EN

Visible as Journals, Invisible as Publishers: Limitations of OpenAlex for Analysing University Publishing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Maryna Nazarovets

This study presents the results of an exploratory audit of publisher-affiliation metadata for a selected sample of university-published journals in OpenAlex. A corpus of 60 UJs from 10 countries, chosen to represent low-visibility publishing environments, was examined. Journal records retrieved from OpenAlex in January 2025 and January 2026 were manually verified against Ulrichsweb, the journals’ websites, and the ISSN Portal, in order to assess the journals’ indexing status and the presence of publisher-related metadata.

While OpenAlex indexes a significant proportion of the sampled journals, including titles not covered by major commercial indexing systems, coverage remains incomplete, even for active journals. Furthermore, structured publisher affiliation was rarely found within the sample.

In January 2025, only 9% of indexed journals were linked to a publisher entity via OpenAlex’s publisher-affiliation fields. By January 2026, publisher names appeared more frequently as unstructured text, while the proportion of journals linked to a publisher entity remained largely unchanged.

These results indicate that university journals are often visible in OpenAlex as sources, but are insufficiently represented at the publisher level, limiting the interpretability of institutional publishing activity and obscuring the role of university publishing in the broader scholarly landscape.

URL : Visible as Journals, Invisible as Publishers: Limitations of OpenAlex for Analysing University Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2061