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“Knock knock! Who’s there?” A study on scholarly repositories’ availability

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Andrea Mannocci, Miriam Baglioni, Paolo Manghi

Scholarly repositories are the cornerstone of modern open science, and their availability is vital for enacting its practices. To this end, scholarly registries such as FAIRsharing, re3data, OpenDOAR and ROAR give them presence and visibility across different research communities, disciplines, and applications by assigning an identifier and persisting their profiles with summary metadata.

Alas, like any other resource available on the Web, scholarly repositories, be they tailored for literature, software or data, are quite dynamic and can be frequently changed, moved, merged or discontinued.

Therefore, their references are prone to link rot over time, and their availability often boils down to whether the homepage URLs indicated in authoritative repository profiles within scholarly registries respond or not.

For this study, we harvested the content of four prominent scholarly registries and resolved over 13 thousand unique repository URLs. By performing a quantitative analysis on such an extensive collection of repositories, this paper aims to provide a global snapshot of their availability, which bewilderingly is far from granted.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12879

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Preprints as a driver of open science: Opportunities for Southeast Asia

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Hilyatuz Zahroh, Iratxe Puebla

Southeast Asia is an emerging force of open access scholarly output. For example, Indonesia is in a tight competition with United Kingdom as the largest publisher of open access journals and the second largest producer of open access articles in the world (according to DOAJ and the COKI OA Dashboard, respectively).

However, this support for open practices is not yet reflected in institutional research policies in Southeast Asian countries, which still rely on criteria influenced by world university rankings that focus on publication outputs and do not incorporate elements related to research culture, integrity, or open science.

Preprints have gained increasing attention across disciplines in the last few years, but they are still not included in institutional policies in SouthEast Asia. This paper discusses the potential for preprints to be a driving force for open science and for quality and integrity in scholarly outputs from Southeast Asia.

There is a fledgling preprinting culture in the region, catalyzed by the RINarxiv preprint server in Indonesia and the Malaysia Open Science Platform. We argue that preprints have many advantages: opportunities for open access and for researchers to maintain copyright to their work, wide dissemination, encouraging feedback and critical thinking, and community governance.

With these advantages, preprints can become a fast and open communication hub between researchers and all stakeholders in the research process. We recommend regulatory and practical steps to incorporate preprints into science policy and researchers’ practices as an effort to promote research integrity, open data and reproducibility.

URL : Preprints as a driver of open science: Opportunities for Southeast Asia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.992942

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The Role of Publons in the Context of Open Peer Review

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Serhii Nazarovets

Publons was a peer reviewer rewards platform that aimed to recognize the contribution that academics made during peer review to a journal. For about 10 years of its existence, Publons became the most popular service among peer reviewers.

Having gained traction and popularity, Publons was purchased in 2017 by Clarivate Analytics (now Clarivate), and many academics, journals and publishers invested time and effort to participate in Publons. Using Publons, various peer review-related experiments or pilot programs were initiated by some academic publishers regarding the introduction of open peer review into their journals’ editorial processes.

In this paper, we examine pertinent literature related to Publons, and reflect on its benefits and flaws during its short-lived history. In mid-August 2022, Clarivate fused Publons into the Web of Science platform.

Publons, as a brand peer review service, has now ceased to exist but some of the functionality remains in Web of Science while other aspects that used to be open and free at Publons are now paid-for services.

We reflect on the effect of such experiments, which initially had bold and ambitious academic objectives to fortify peer review, on academics’ trust, especially when such projects become commercialized.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09914-0

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Evaluation and publication delay in Ibero-American scientific journals

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jon Zabala, Borja González-Albo, Ana García-García, Aurora Garrido-Domínguez, José Ignacio Vidal-Liy, Luis R. Álvarez-Díez, Soledad Hernando-Tundidor, Yara Mostazo-Fernández, Teresa Abejón

This article analyses the review, acceptance and publication dates of a sample of 21,890 articles from 326 Ibero-American scientific journals from all subject areas and countries included in the Latindex Catalogue 2.0 and published between 2018 and 2020 (freely available as an open access dataset).

The aim is to discover evaluation and publication times. The evaluation process takes a median of 110 days, the publication process, a median of 82 days, and the whole process, a median of 224 days. Statistical differences are found according to periodicity, subject areas, countries, existence of a printed version and article type (Call for Papers or General articles). From the data we find that the delay in publication is longer than publishers themselves report to the DOAJ.

STEM areas present the most similarity in publication patterns, having a higher number of evaluation days (Ed) than publication days (Pd); Arts and Humanities present the opposite pattern, with a higher Pd than Ed. In the case of Social Sciences, the times are similar. General articles and Call for Papers articles differ in terms of Ed, but not Pd, indicating that Call for Papers revisions are faster.

URL : Evaluation and publication delay in Ibero-American scientific journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1497

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Reusable, FAIR Humanities Data : Creating Practical Guidance for Authors at Routledge Open Research

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Rebecca Grant

While stakeholders including funding agencies and academic publishers implement more stringent data sharing policies, challenges remain for researchers in the humanities who are increasingly prompted to share their research data.

This paper outlines some key challenges of research data sharing in the humanities, and identifies existing work which has been undertaken to explore these challenges. It describes the current landscape regarding publishers’ research data sharing policies, and the impact which strong data policies can have, regardless of discipline.

Using Routledge Open Research as a case study, the development of a set of humanities-inclusive Open Data publisher data guidelines is then described. These include practical guidance in relation to data sharing for humanities authors, and a close alignment with the FAIR Data Principles.

URL : Reusable, FAIR Humanities Data : Creating Practical Guidance for Authors at Routledge Open Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.820

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Increasing the Reuse of Data through FAIR-enabling the Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Benjamin Jacob Mathers, Hervé L’Hours

The long-term preservation of digital objects, and the means by which they can be reused, are addressed by both the FAIR Data Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and a number of standards bodies providing Trustworthy Digital Repository (TDR) certification, such as the CoreTrustSeal.

Though many of the requirements listed in the Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements 2020–2022 Extended Guidance address the FAIR Data Principles indirectly, there is currently no formal ‘FAIR Certification’ offered by the CoreTrustSeal or other TDR standards bodies. To address this gap the FAIRsFAIR project developed a number of tools and resources that facilitate the assessment of FAIR-enabling practices at the repository level as well as the FAIRness of datasets within them.

These include the CoreTrustSeal+FAIRenabling Capability Maturity model (CTS+FAIR CapMat), a FAIR-Enabling Trustworthy Digital Repositories-Capability Maturity Self-Assessment template, and F-UJI ,  a web-based tool designed to assess the FAIRness of research data objects.

The success of such tools and resources ultimately depends upon community uptake. This requires a community-wide commitment to develop best practices to increase the reuse of data and to reach consensus on what these practices are.

One possible way of achieving community consensus would be through the creation of a network of FAIR-enabling TDRs, as proposed by FAIRsFAIR.

URL : Increasing the Reuse of Data through FAIR-enabling the Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.852

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Journals preserved or how to turn Diamond into JASPER

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Gaelle Bequet

The increase in the number of digital journals has redefined the respective roles of libraries and publishers in the selection, provision and preservation of this content. A new player has emerged, i.e. the archiving agency specializing in long-term digital preservation.

Open access journals are poorly preserved, as shown by two recent studies based on an analysis of titles indexed by DOAJ. This worrying finding has motivated DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Keepers Registry, Internet Archive and Public Knowledge Project to join forces to propose an archiving solution for journals without article processing charges.

The JASPER project resulted in the creation of a tool and a workflow allowing the preservation of a dozen journals. The next step is to go to scale (more journals archived, more agencies involved), conditioned subject to the mobilization of external funding.

URL : Journals preserved or how to turn Diamond into JASPER

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.591