EN

Peer review across borders: benefits and challenges of international review panels in research funding organizations

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Helen Peterson, Liisa Husu

Peer review by external experts is widely recognized as a legitimate and trustworthy academic practice, essential for ensuring the quality and rigor of research, providing more objective and less impartial assessments, and promoting transparent decision-making in science and academia. Research Funding Organisations (RFOs) usually rely on some form of peer review to evaluate the scientific quality of research proposals to allocate their limited resources.

The peer review system is, however, also associated with several weaknesses, such as risks for bias and conflict of interest. This article explores the implications of replacing National Review Panels (NRPs) with International Review Panels (IRPs) in a national RFO, examining how this shift may impact the peer review process.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with staff from a national RFO in a European country and members of its IRPs, the article provides a nuanced analysis of both the potential benefits and challenges with substituting NRPs with IRPs.

The results highlight how IRPs increase the distance between applicants and reviewers, which benefits the impartiality of the process. Nevertheless, this distance needs to be balanced by domestic panel members, chairs or research officers possessing appropriate knowledge of the local academic context, culture and structure.

IRPs also introduce a greater diversity of perspectives into the assessments of applicants, which may promote objective and balanced assessments. The diversity may however also lower inter-reviewer reliability, and, in turn, complicate calibration practices and hinder the development of informal deliberative norms during the process of reaching decisions and consensus.

URL : Peer review across borders: benefits and challenges of international review panels in research funding organizations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvaf030

EN

Worth the Cost? Researchers’ Use and Experience With Commercial Services for Research Outreach

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Hamid R. Jamali

Introduction

Research outreach activities aim to communicate specific research findings to non-specialist audiences. In recent years, commercial outreach services have emerged that offer fee-based assistance in transforming research findings into accessible reader-friendly content, including multimedia content, and promotional material aimed at broader audiences.

They may also publish the content on their own platforms, such as magazines or websites, to further enhance research visibility and dissemination. The experiences associated with these services are poorly understood. This study examined the motivation for use, challenges, and perceived value of commercial services for research outreach among researchers.

Methods

An online questionnaire surveyed researchers who had published with two commercial services, ResearchOutreach.org or ResearchFeatures.com, between January 2022 and February 2024, yielding 104 responses (20% response rate).

Results

Most respondents used commercial services to increase their research visibility and reach a broader audience. Factors influencing researchers’ decision to use commercial services included convenience, professionalism, broad audience access, and insufficient university outreach support.Most respondents (91.5%) were satisfied with the representation of their research, and about half faced no challenges.

One-third said they would recommend the service; however, issues like content quality, time consumption, and high costs were noted. Interestingly, a third of the participants paid personally, and around 67% reported no significant impact from the publication on their work.

Discussion

While commercial outreach services can enhance research visibility, their cost-effectiveness and impact vary. A significant portion of researchers reported little to no tangible benefits from these services, which raises concerns about their cost-effectiveness and the accuracy of marketing claims.

Conclusion

This study reveals a mix of positive and negative experiences with commercial outreach services, which highlights that their usefulness depends on individual circumstances and expectations. Concerns around cost and effectiveness persist. More transparent evaluations are needed. Collaboration between institutions and service providers might help support effective research dissemination and ensure equitable access to outreach resources.

URL : Worth the Cost? Researchers’ Use and Experience With Commercial Services for Research Outreach

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18409

FR

Revues de droit et science ouverte : écosystème, pratiques des chercheurs, rôle des bibliothèques

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Pierre Guibourg

Cette étude vise à décrire l’écosystème actuel des revues françaises de droit, qui semble dominé par des logiques extra-académiques, au premier plan desquelles le poids important des grands éditeurs privés.

Dans ce contexte, se pose la question de l’accès ouvert en droit, qui est moins développé que dans les autres SHS, ainsi que celle des actions que mènent et que peuvent mener les bibliothèques pour faire changer cette situation.

URL : Revues de droit et science ouverte : écosystème, pratiques des chercheurs, rôle des bibliothèques

enssib : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/73421-revues-de-droit-et-science-ouverte-ecosysteme-pratiques-des-chercheurs-role-des-bibliotheques

FR

(In)former, accompagner, convaincre : comment engager les jeunes chercheurs dans la science ouverte

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur : Adrien Julla-Marcy

Le sujet des jeunes chercheurs a progressivement pris de l’importance au cours des dix dernières années jusqu’à devenir un enjeu majeur des politiques d’ouverture de la science. Les jeunes chercheurs sont identifiés comme le public-cible des actions de formation car ils aspirent à des valeurs d’intégrité de la recherche proches des principes de la science ouverte.

Pour autant, ils subissent des injonctions contradictoires entre volonté d’ouverture et stratégies de carrière.

Si les services d’appui à la recherche disposent de leviers concrets pour les convaincre d’ouvrir leur production scientifique, poser la question de l’engagement des jeunes chercheurs suppose de réfléchir à la réforme des conditions de la recherche et, en particulier, de l’évaluation.

URL : (In)former, accompagner, convaincre : comment engager les jeunes chercheurs dans la science ouverte

enssib : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/documents/73422-informer-accompagner-convaincre-comment-engager-les-jeunes-chercheurs-dans-la-science-ouverte.pdf

EN

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Benedetto Lepori, Jens Peter Andersen, Karsten Donnay

The aim of this paper is to review the use of GenAI in scientometrics, and to begin a debate on the broader implications for the field. First, we provide an introduction on GenAI’s generative and probabilistic nature as rooted in distributional linguistics.

And we relate this to the debate on the extent to which GenAI might be able to mimic human ‘reasoning’. Second, we leverage this distinction for a critical engagement with recent experiments using GenAI in scientometrics, including topic labelling, the analysis of citation contexts, predictive applications, scholars’ profiling, and research assessment.

GenAI shows promise in tasks where language generation dominates, such as labelling, but faces limitations in tasks that require stable semantics, pragmatic reasoning, or structured domain knowledge. However, these results might become quickly outdated. Our recommendation is, therefore, to always strive to systematically compare the performance of different GenAI models for specific tasks.

Third, we inquire whether, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might have a fundamental impact on our field by affecting textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.00783

 

EN

Scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity: How exclusive databases sustain the oligopoly of academic publishers

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Simon van Bellen, Juan Pablo Alperin, Vincent Larivière

Global scholarly publishing has been dominated by a small number of publishers for several decades. This paper revisits the data on corporate control of scholarly publishing by analyzing the relative shares of scholarly journals and articles published by the major publishers and the “long tail” of smaller, independent publishers, using Dimensions and Web of Science (WoS).

The reduction of expenses for printing and distribution and the availability of open-source journal management tools may have contributed to the emergence of small publishers, while recently developed inclusive databases may allow for the study of these. Dimensions’ inclusive indexing revealed the number of scholarly journals and articles published by smaller publishers has been growing rapidly, especially since the onset of large-scale online publishing around 2000, resulting in a higher share of articles from smaller publishers.

In parallel, WoS shows increasing concentration within a few corporate publishers. For the 1980–2021 period, we retrieved 32% more articles from Dimensions compared to the more selective WoS.

Dimensions’ data showed the expansion of small publishers was most pronounced in the Social Sciences and the Arts and Humanities, but a similar trend is observed in the Natural Sciences and Engineering, and the Health Sciences. A major geographical divergence is also revealed, with English-speaking countries and/or those located in northwestern Europe relying heavily on major publishers for the dissemination of their research, while the rest of the world being relatively independent of the oligopoly.

Finally, independent journals publish more often in open access in general, and in Diamond open access in particular. We conclude that enhanced indexing and visibility of recently created, independent journals may favour their growth and stimulate global scholarly bibliodiversity.

URL : Scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity: How exclusive databases sustain the oligopoly of academic publishers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0327015

EN

Peer Review as Structured Commentary: Immutable Identity, Public Dialogue, and Reproducible Scholarship

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Craig Steven Wright

This paper reconceptualises peer review as structured public commentary. Traditional academic validation is hindered by anonymity, latency, and gatekeeping. We propose a transparent, identity-linked, and reproducible system of scholarly evaluation anchored in open commentary.

Leveraging blockchain for immutable audit trails and AI for iterative synthesis, we design a framework that incentivises intellectual contribution, captures epistemic evolution, and enables traceable reputational dynamics.

This model empowers fields from computational science to the humanities, reframing academic knowledge as a living process rather than a static credential.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.22497