Étiquette : scientific practices

Catégories
EN

Opening Pandora’s box: Paper mills in conference proceedings

Authors : Anna Abalkina, Marie Kunešová, Yagmur Ozturk, Solal Pirelli

Objective

Paper mills are a growing threat to the integrity of science, yet their penetration in conference proceedings remains underexplored despite conferences being more important than journals in some scientific subfields. This study aims to identify papers in conference proceedings whose titles have been offered for sale on social media platforms.

Methods

We collected publication offers for more than 4,000 unique paper titles or topics from more than 200 social media channels and used semi-automated methods along with human assessment to match offers with papers published in IEEE conference proceedings.

Results

We identified 2,062 papers in 366 IEEE conference proceedings, accounting for up to 23.5% of an individual conference. These problematic papers are coauthored by more than 7,500 researchers from over 2,000 institutions or companies in 56 countries. The identified papers demonstrate collaboration anomalies, high diversity of affiliations per paper, citation manipulation, a predominance of six-author papers, and content irregularities.

Conclusions

Our findings show that paper mills are a large, organized, and often public market that commercializes scientific misconduct.

URL : Opening Pandora’s box: Paper mills in conference proceedings

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2733727

Catégories
EN

Evolution of the Involvement of Researchers From the University of Caen (France) in Author Identifiers and Social Networks: 2019–2023

Authors : Sarah Marcq, Aline Bouchard, Isabelle Mauger Perez, Benjamin Bober, Christophe Boudry

As author identifier services (AIDs) and academic social networks (ASNs) have become increasingly central to scholarly communication in the last decade, it is important to study how these tools are being used and how far researchers are involved in these services.

This study aims to assess the evolution of the presence of researchers from 2019 to 2023, on three AIDs (ORCID, ResearcherID and IdHAL) and on two ASNs (ResearchGate and Academia) categorized by discipline and career advancement in a medium-sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy).

The total number of publications found on each of the five sites studied was assessed to evaluate the ability of these sites to provide an accurate view of the scientific output of individuals and their institution.

In this case, for each of the researchers we need to determine whether they had a profile on any website studied, and to record the number of their publications. As main results, the number of profiles has increased across the five sites studied over the period 2019–2023.

This increase is very important on two of the five sites studied: IdHAL and ORCID (330% and 159% increase, respectively), while it is more moderate on the other three sites (less than 30%). This illustrates the result of incentive policies implemented in France in recent years concerning IdHAL and ORCID.

The analysis of the number of publications on each profile in 2019 and 2023 across the five sites studied showed large differences in terms of the total number of publications included in profiles, highlighting the inability of these sites to qualify a population of researchers by considering the number of publications available on these different sites.

To complement this study, future research should consider analysing the content and methods of data entry on these sites, particularly ORCID, as well as the frequency with which this data is updated, especially in relation to the development of different providers in the context of open science.

URL : Evolution of the Involvement of Researchers From the University of Caen (France) in Author Identifiers and Social Networks: 2019–2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2101

Catégories
EN

Are AI-Empowered Early Career Researchers Proving To Be the Harbingers of Change?

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

The Harbingers longitudinal study of early career researchers and their pathfinding scholarly communication attitudes and practices is a decade old and much of its findings have been published in this journal.

We are now moving on to the new generation of researchers—Gen-Z and it is fitting that we draw things to a close by summing up whether our largely millennial researchers have proved to be the harbingers of change.

We focus on the data from the last two rounds of interviewing, conducted in the last 2 years, at a time when AI was (increasingly) propelling change. These two rounds covered over 150 ECRs from all subject fields and from China, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, UK and US.

It was found that ECRs are, indeed, at the forefront of the technological adaptation in research, actively exploring the potential of AI and new communication channels. However, their ability to be truly transformative was constrained by a traditional, quantitative evaluation/reputational system.

This could change with Gen-Z because there were ECRs in their twenties included in our previous studies and they displayed higher practical integration of AI tools and appeared to be more strategically adopting AI for efficiency and career advancement.

URL : Learned Publishing – 2026 – Nicholas – Are AI‐Empowered Early Career Researchers Proving To Be the Harbingers of Change

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2099

Catégories
FR

Pratiques de gestion et de partage des données de recherche. Retour d’expérience de quatre projets SHS lauréats du Prix Science Ouverte 2025

Auteur/Author : Joachim Schöpfel

Cet article propose une étude comparative de quatre projets de recherche lauréats du Prix Science Ouverte 2025 issus des sciences humaines et sociales (humanités numériques, linguistique, sociologie quantitative et longitudinale), en se concentrant sur leurs pratiques de gestion des données de recherche.

À partir d’entretiens qualitatifs, l’étude examine les types de données produites, les modalités de gestion, les responsabilités, ainsi que les stratégies de partage et de valorisation. L’analyse est structurée selon les principes FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Les résultats mettent en évidence une forte hétérogénéité des pratiques, mais aussi une convergence vers une professionnalisation accrue de la gestion des données et une intégration progressive des exigences de la science ouverte.

Une attention particulière est accordée à l’impact du Prix Science Ouverte des Données de la Recherche, dont les effets se manifestent principalement en termes de reconnaissance, de visibilité et de consolidation des pratiques.

URL : https://lilloa.hal.science/hal-05634994v2

Catégories
EN

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

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

Catégories
EN

Digging deeper into data citations: recognizing and rewarding data work

Authors :  Kathleen Gregory, Stefanie Haustein, Constance Poitras, Emma Roblin, Anton Ninkov, Chantal Ripp, Isabella Peters

Citations and metrics are central features in evaluating academic careers. As researchers increasingly engage in open science, data citations have emerged as potential mechanisms for evaluating and rewarding data sharing and reuse in academic assessments.

Despite this, we still lack critical information about the data citation practices and motivations of researchers themselves, information which is needed to contextualize the use of such metrics.

Here, we present the results of a semi-structured interview study with researchers across disciplines exploring their data referencing practices and motivations, as well as how they would like their ‘data work’ (including data sharing) to be rewarded and evaluated. As a whole, our findings confirm a lack of standard practices for referencing data and provide new insights into the social and scientific reasons motivating data referencing.

While our results show an overall skepticism toward the use of citation-based metrics in evaluations, they also suggest that researchers are caught between traditional and emergent modes of assessment for recognizing data work.

Furthermore, we find that rather than valuing data citations as rewards, our participants value creating data objects which are useful for their (often small) research communities. Ultimately, we conclude that data work is a cornerstone of research practice which needs to be evaluated and considered, but one which also requires context-aware approaches.

URL : Digging deeper into data citations: recognizing and rewarding data work

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvag008

Catégories
EN

Perceptions and values of Spanish women scientists towards digital science communication

Authors : Rosana Villares, Carmen Pérez-Llantada, Oana Maria Carciu

The digitalisation of science communication has been widely promoted within the Open Science movement in Europe to foster the social impact of research, as well as a more participatory culture of science.

Using semi-structured interviews, we explore Spanish women scientists’ values and perceptions regarding digital science communication. Results highlight the social value of science communication as well as intrinsic motivation as factors to actively engage in disseminating, educating and promoting science digitally.

Adopting Open Science principles, participants craft open access multimodal materials (e.g., educational short videos, podcasts), use supporting multimodal resources and digital tools, and engage in social media to reach broad audiences.

Finally, we propose some policy recommendations and pedagogical guidelines in terms of digital literacy, digital genres, and science accommodation strategies to promote digital science communication.

URL : Perceptions and values of Spanish women scientists towards digital science communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/156420251226063745