Toward a new model of scientific publishing discussion…

Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal :

“The current system of publishing in the biological sciences is notable for its redundancy, inconsistency, sluggishness, and opacity. These problems persist, and grow worse, because the peer review system remains focused on deciding whether or not to publish a paper in a particular journal rather than providing (1) a high-quality evaluation of scientific merit and (2) the information necessary to organize and prioritize the literature. Online access has eliminated the need for journals as distribution channels, so their primary current role is to provide authors with feedback prior to publication and a quick way for other researchers to prioritize the literature based on which journal publishes a paper. However, the feedback provided by reviewers is not focused on scientific merit but on whether to publish in a particular journal, which is generally of little use to authors and an opaque and noisy basis for prioritizing the literature. Further, each submission of a rejected manuscript requires the entire machinery of peer review to creak to life anew. This redundancy incurs delays, inconsistency, and increased burdens on authors, reviewers, and editors. Finally, reviewers have no real incentive to review well or quickly, as their performance is not tracked, let alone rewarded. One of the consistent suggestions for modifying the current peer review system is the introduction of some form of post-publication reception, and the development of a marketplace where the priority of a paper rises and falls based on its reception from the field (see other articles in this special topics). However, the information that accompanies a paper into the marketplace is as important as the marketplace’s mechanics. Beyond suggestions concerning the mechanisms of reception, we propose an update to the system of publishing in which publication is guaranteed, but pre-publication peer review still occurs, giving the authors the opportunity to revise their work following a mini pre-reception from the field. This step also provides a consistent set of rankings and reviews to the marketplace, allowing for early prioritization and stabilizing its early dynamics. We further propose to improve the general quality of reviewing by providing tangible rewards to those who do it well.”
URL : http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2011.00055/full

Sharing and the Creative Economy Culture in the…

Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age :

“In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world. Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works. Taking stock of what we have learnt about the cultural economy in recent years, Sharing sets out the conditions necessary for valuable cultural functions to remain sustainable in this context.”
URL : http://paigrain.debatpublic.net/docs/internet_creation_1-3.pdf
URL : http://www.amazon.com/Sharing-Culture-Economy-Internet-Age/dp/9089643850

Mathematicians’ Views on Current Publishing Issues A Survey…

Mathematicians’ Views on Current Publishing Issues: A Survey of Researchers :

This article reports research mathematicians’ attitudes about and activity in specific scholarly communication areas, as captured in a 2010 survey of more than 600 randomly-selected mathematicians worldwide. Key findings include:

  • Most mathematicians have papers in the arXiv, but posting to their own web pages remains more common;
  • A third of mathematicians have published papers in open access (OA) journals, with speed of publication being seen as the primary advantage over traditional journals, but there is substantial philosophical opposition to OA journal models that charge author fees;
  • Tenure and promotion criteria influence publishing decisions even among most tenured faculty members;
  • Mathematicians want to keep more rights to their publications than they have been allowed, but they have a high success rate in negotiating with publishers for more;
  • Online collaboration tools, such as Google Groups, are not yet widely used for research but their use is expected to rise in the near future.

Reasons behind the mathematics culture of openness were also explored.”

URL : http://www.istl.org/11-fall/refereed4.html

Citations to Wikipedia in Chemistry Journals: A Preliminary Study

Wikipedia has been the subject of an increasing number of studies. Many of these have focused on the quality of Wikipedia articles and the use of Wikipedia by students. Little research has focused on the use of Wikipedia by scholars. This study helps to fill that gap by examining citations to Wikipedia in chemistry journals from three major publishers over a five year period.

The study reports the number of citations to Wikipedia and describes how Wikipedia is being cited. The results show that, while only a small percentage of all articles contained a citation to Wikipedia, it is in fact being cited as a credible information source in articles in major chemistry journals.

URL : http://www.istl.org/11-fall/refereed2.html

National Open Access and Preservation Policies in Europe…

National Open Access and Preservation Policies in Europe :

“The present report is the analysis of the answers to the questionnaire that the European Commission prepared on open access and preservation policies in Europe, with a view to taking stock in 2011 of the status of implementation of the 2007 Council conclusions on scientific information in the digital age.”

URL : http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/open-access-report-2011_en.pdf

Force11 White Paper Improving Future Research Communication and…

Force11 White Paper: Improving Future Research Communication and e-Scholarship :

“Research and scholarship lead to the generation of new knowledge. The dissemination of this knowledge has a fundamental impact on the ways in which society develops and progresses, and at the same time it feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship. Here, as in so many other areas of human activity, the internet is changing the way things work: it opens up opportunities for new processes that can accelerate the growth of knowledge, including the creation of new means of communicating that knowledge among researchers and within the wider community. Two decades of emergent and increasingly pervasive information technology have demonstrated the potential for far more effective scholarly communication. However, the use of this technology remains limited; research processes and the dissemination of research results have yet to fully assimilate the capabilities of the web and other digital media. Producers and consumers remain wedded to formats developed in the era of print publication, and the reward systems for researchers remain tied to those delivery mechanisms.

Force11 (the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in scholarly communication through the effective use of information technology. Force11 has grown from a small group of like-minded individuals into an open movement with clearly identified stakeholders associated with emerging technologies, policies, funding mechanisms and business models. While not disputing the expressive power of the written word to communicate complex ideas, our foundational assumption is that scholarly communication by means of semantically-enhanced media-rich digital publishing is likely to have a greater impact than communication in traditional print media or electronic facsimiles of printed works. However, to date, online versions of ‘scholarly outputs’ have tended to replicate print forms, rather than exploit the additional functionalities afforded by the digital terrain. We believe that digital publishing of enhanced papers will enable more effective scholarly communication, which will also broaden to include, for example, better links to data, the publication of software tools, mathematical models, protocols and workflows, and research communication by means of social media channels.

This document highlights the findings of the Force11 workshop on the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in August 2011: it summarizes a number of key problems facing scholarly publishing today, and presents a vision that addresses these problems, proposing concrete steps that key stakeholders can take to improve the state of scholarly publishing. More about Force11 can be found at http://www.force11.org. This White Paper is a collaborative effort that reflects the input of all Force11 attendees at the Dagstuhl Workshop, and is very much a living document . We see it as a starting point that will grow and be updated and augmented by individual and collective efforts by the participants and others. We invite you to join and contribute to this enterprise.”

UR : http://www.force11.org/node/1688