Auteur/autrice : Hans Dillaerts

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Against the current: Sole authorship as method in contemplative and conceptual scholarship

Author : Heather Kempton

In the context of escalating authorship inflation and growing concern about research integrity, this article examines sole authorship as an epistemically and ethically grounded methodological condition within specific forms of contemplative and conceptual scholarship.

Focusing on forms of inquiry in which interpretation constitutes the primary analytic process, I argue that sole authorship supports a continuous and traceable interpretive arc, central to epistemic integrity.

In such contexts, continuity of interpretation not only enables conceptual coherence but also underpins ethical accountability by ensuring that responsibility for interpretive decisions remains clearly identifiable across the analytic process.

Framed as a contemplative method grounded in mindful solitude, understood as an intentional orientation toward inward integration, sole authorship is situated within contemplative psychology and extended to methodologies such as Intuitive Inquiry, heuristic inquiry, hermeneutic phenomenology, and autoethnography, where interpretive validity depends on a sustained authorial perspective.

While collaborative research remains essential across many domains, this article identifies conditions under which a unified authorial voice provides methodological advantages not fully reproduced through distributed authorship.

The argument is therefore not that sole authorship offers a general solution, but that it functions as a context-specific stance aligned with the epistemic and ethical demands of contemplative scholarship.

URL : Against the current: Sole authorship as method in contemplative and conceptual scholarship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2714974

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Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record

Authors : George Macgregor, Joy Davidson

This article seeks to determine the extent to which the principle of persistence is observed by repositories and the organizations that operate them. In addition, the impact that negative repository persistence levels may be having on the scholarly record is assessed.

This is achieved by interrogating and combining data on European repositories from several repository registries and web-scraped sources, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which creates a unique dataset of historic repository locations and their OAI-PMH endpoints.

Then, this data is used as the basis for text mining CORE, a vast corpus of scholarly outputs, to determine the extent to which impersistent European repository content has permeated the scholarly literature. The findings indicate that over one-fifth of European repositories (greater than 20 per cent) could be classified as “dead,” with an even greater proportion (greater than 40 per cent) of the machine interfaces associated with these repositories similarly dead.

Problematically, this analysis indicates that approximately 12,000 unique scholarly works cite, refer to, or actively use this repository content, amounting to approximately 19,000 unique repository locations, all of which are now dead and unretrievable from their stated resource locations. Partly owing to limitations in available repository registry data and the existence of “zombie” repositories, there are reasons to conclude that the total number of scholarly works referring to dead repository content is far higher.

In addition, evidence of dead repository content entering the current scholarly record is found, which is described as “dead on arrival” referencing.

The implications of these observations are considered, explanations are proffered, and possible policy interventions to address repository persistence are proposed. The dataset also enables several observations on the nature of impersistent repositories to be made, including their profile and their decay rate.

URL : Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v20i1.1116

 

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Information avoidance in academia: A grounded theory study of when and why scholars choose not to seek relevant information

Authors : Akinade Adebowale Adewojo, Emmanuel Adefila

This qualitative study employed constructivist grounded theory to investigate information avoidance behaviors among 25 Nigerian scholars across three universities (October 2025–January 2026).

Through interviews, artifact analysis, and reflective diaries, five themes emerged: emotional triggers, cognitive strategies, organizational pressures, discipline-specific patterns (STEM data exclusion vs humanities source avoidance), and consequences (reduced research quality, timeline delays).

Results demonstrate that avoidance stems from systemic institutional factors rather than individual shortcomings. Findings indicate that publication metrics and funding constraints create information silos, while disciplinary norms shape avoidance pathways.

Recommendations include reforming performance metrics, implementing discipline-specific interventions, and embedding psychological safety in academic culture.

This research addresses critical gaps in understanding scholarly information behavior and provides actionable strategies to enhance research integrity and reproducibility in high-pressure academic environments.

URL : Information avoidance in academia: A grounded theory study of when and why scholars choose not to seek relevant information

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/18758789261468726

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The role of editorial boards in shaping scholarly communication: A large-scale mapping of their composition and structure

Authors : Evangelina Becerra-Rodero, José Luis Ortega

Editorial boards play a central role in shaping scholarly communication by influencing what research is published and how disciplinary boundaries are defined. Despite their importance, large-scale, systematic evidence on their composition and structure remains limited.

This study provides a comprehensive descriptive analysis of editorial boards across major scholarly publishers, with the aim of characterizing their organizational structure and the distribution of editorial positions. Using a corpus of over 810,000 editorial positions across more than 10,000 journals from 15 publishers, we examine board size and its relationship to journal output, develop a harmonized nine-class ontology of editorial roles, and analyze gender representation, institutional sectors, and geographic distribution.

We also benchmark coverage against the Open Editors dataset, a previously released resource on editorial board composition. The results reveal stratified editorial structures dominated by operational roles, a positive association between board size and journal throughput, and a strong concentration of editors in academic institutions.

Women represent approximately one-third of identified editors, and editorial presence is concentrated in the United States and Western Europe. This study provides large-scale descriptive evidence on editorial board organization and establishes an empirical baseline for future research on editorial governance, diversity, and the distribution of influence in scholarly publishing.

URL : The role of editorial boards in shaping scholarly communication: A large-scale mapping of their composition and structure

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fasi.70108

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Building internationally competitive journals for science data sharing: The evolution of three biomedical English academic journals launched in China

Authors : Huisheng Wang, Hao Cheng

Academic journals serve as the platform of scientific collaboration. As China’s contribution to world-class science is advancing at a remarkable pace, cultivating world-class English-language journals has become a national imperative issue. Taking Academician George F. Gao and the three flagship journals he founded or led—Protein & Cell (2010), China CDC Weekly (2019), and hLife (2023)—as examples, herein we trace the evolutionary trajectory of English-language periodicals in China, dissecting their evolving missions, internationalization strategies and contributions to biosafety and ethical governance to provide a reproducible roadmap for currently-emerging journals.

Through analyses of the case of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) gene-editing ethics controversy, pandemic-data-sharing protocols, and international cooperation frameworks, we highlight that journals are pivotal arenas where domestic and global scientific discourses on critical biosafety and public health issues are made.

Building internationally competitive journals for science data sharing scientific governance will serve as a critical foundation for China’s ambitions to become a scientific power and for its deeper engagement in global science and technology governance.

URL : Building internationally competitive journals for science data sharing: The evolution of three biomedical English academic journals launched in China

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bsheal.2026.04.002

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Research integrity and open access models: insights from Retraction Watch and OpenAlex

Author : Ben Rawlins

This study examines the relationship between research integrity and open access (OA) publishing models using data from Retraction Watch and OpenAlex. Analysing 60,608 retracted publications from 2009 to 2024, the article traces how retraction patterns have shifted alongside the expansion of OA, with gold OA surpassing closed access as the dominant modality among retracted articles by 2023.

The analysis also highlights the economic dimensions of research integrity and OA, with an estimated US$41.9 million in article processing charges (APCs) collected by publishers for research that was later retracted.

These findings raise concerns about APC‑based publishing models that directly link publisher revenue to publication volume, creating structural tensions for editorial oversight and quality control. Rather than framing OA as inherently more or less prone to integrity failures, the article argues that these challenges reflect broader incentive structures within contemporary scholarly publishing.

Addressing them will require co‑ordinated governance efforts among publishers, funders, libraries and research institutions to ensure that OA is matched by accountability, transparency and trust in scholarly research.

URL : Research integrity and open access models: insights from Retraction Watch and OpenAlex

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.763

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The Rise of Diamond Open Access Journals in Earth Sciences: Past Developments, Present Tensions, and Future Pathways

Authors : Olivier Pourret, Maëlis Arnould, Thibault Duretz, James Ian Farquharson, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Larry Syu-Heng Lai, Alice Lefebvre, Craig Magee, Marc-Alban Millet, Samantha Teplitzky, Camille Thomas, Romain Vaucher, Lauren Waszek, Mark A Wieczorek, Thomas William Wong Hearing

Over roughly the last decade, a visible, community-led Diamond Open Access (OA) ecosystem has emerged in the Earth sciences, not as a departure from tradition, but as the latest expression of a long-standing culture of open, society-supported scholarly communication.

While free-to-read, fee-free publishing initiatives have deep roots in the field, predating the Diamond terminology by decades and encompassing regional infrastructures and institutional serial publishing by geological surveys and learned societies, the period since the mid-2010s has brought a new wave of explicitly Diamond-identified, community-governed disciplinary journals that have transformed the visibility and ambition of this model. This article analyzes that transition through a field-specific lens, taking journals such as Volcanica, Seismica, Tektonika, Geomorphica, Geodynamica, Sedimentologika, Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, Open Paleontology, Planetary Research, and Journal of Studies of Earth’s Deep Interior as emblematic of a broader shift in scholarly communication.

Building on current Diamond OA debates, we argue that Earth sciences Diamond journals are not merely “no-fee” outlets but sociotechnical experiments in reclaiming agency, redistributing publishing labor, and redefining value away from commercial metrics. This article develops three claims. First, the Earth sciences Diamond turn has been enabled by existing community infrastructures and high levels of volunteer coordination, but it remains uneven and fragile.

Second, Diamond models strengthen equity for authors and readers while exposing unresolved tensions around labor sustainability, institutional support, and recognition regimes still structured by prestige metrics. Third, Earth sciences offer a strategically important testbed for a wider transition towards commons-based scholarly communication, especially where global fieldwork, data justice, and decolonizing commitments demand alternatives to the pay-to-read and pay-to-publish systems.

We conclude that the next decade should prioritize durable funding compacts, shared technical infrastructure, and reform of research assessment so that Diamond OA can scale without reproducing extractive or technocratic governance.

URL : The Rise of Diamond Open Access Journals in Earth Sciences: Past Developments, Present Tensions, and Future Pathways

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31223/X56J5P