Hans Dillaerts – Page 59 – InfoDoc MicroVeille

The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

Posté le 6 mai 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Author : Joshua M. Pearce

It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates.

OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing.

Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work).

The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.

URL : The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/knowledge2020013

Biosecurity in an age of open science

Posté le 6 mai 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : James Andrew Smith, Jonas B. Sandbrink

The risk of accidental or deliberate misuse of biological research is increasing as biotechnology advances. As open science becomes widespread, we must consider its impact on those risks and develop solutions that ensure security while facilitating scientific progress.

Here, we examine the interaction between open science practices and biosecurity and biosafety to identify risks and opportunities for risk mitigation. Increasing the availability of computational tools, datasets, and protocols could increase risks from research with misuse potential.

For instance, in the context of viral engineering, open code, data, and materials may increase the risk of release of enhanced pathogens. For this dangerous subset of research, both open science and biosecurity goals may be achieved by using access-controlled repositories or application programming interfaces. While preprints accelerate dissemination of findings, their increased use could challenge strategies for risk mitigation at the publication stage.

This highlights the importance of oversight earlier in the research lifecycle. Preregistration of research, a practice promoted by the open science community, provides an opportunity for achieving biosecurity risk assessment at the conception of research.

Open science and biosecurity experts have an important role to play in enabling responsible research with maximal societal benefit.

URL : Biosecurity in an age of open science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001600

Surveillance Publishing

Posté le 5 mai 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Author : Jeff Pooley

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior.

The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq.

The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to unviersity and other customers.

The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics business. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics.

The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

URL : Surveillance Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1874

Ask the Editors: Assessing the Publishing Needs of Faculty Editors

Posté le 5 mai 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Matthew E. Hunter, Liz Dunne, Camille Thomas, Laura Miller, Devin Soper

Introduction

This article reports results from a survey of faculty members with editorial responsibilities. The survey explored what publishing services and platform functionalities respondents found most valuable in their work as editors, how satisfied they were with the services provided by commercial publishers, and to what extent they were aware of alternative publishing practices.

Method

The authors used data collected from a survey instrument that was distributed to a sample (n = 515) of faculty members with editorial responsibilities at their institution.

Results

Collected data suggest that faculty editors value specific publishing services (e.g., coordination of peer review and copyediting) and platform functionality (e.g., submission and peer-review management) more than others, recognize several challenges facing academic publishing in their disciplines (including the transition to open access publishing models), and are mostly aware of common forms of open access research dissemination such as open access journals and institutional repositories.

Discussion

The survey results may be helpful to library publishers in making decisions about what publishing services and platform functionalities to prioritize in the development of their publishing programs. In addition to utilizing the survey data to assess the needs of editors, the authors also identified a number of expanded uses of the survey related to marketing and outreach.

Conclusion

Insofar as faculty editors are key stakeholders that library publishers seek to build partnerships with, it is important to understand their needs and preferences as editors. This article provides some insight into these questions that may prove helpful to library publishers.

URL : Ask the Editors: Assessing the Publishing Needs of Faculty Editors

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.12912

Les podcasts de sciences en SHS et STS. Formes expressives, objectifs et acteurs

Posté le 1 mai 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Auteure/Author : Clara Perissat

Ce mémoire traite des podcasts comme un genre à part entière. En effet, le podcast est un média en vogue ces dernières années. L’accessibilité des nouvelles technologies et des plateformes de diffusion ainsi que la forme intimiste du podcast font que de plus en plus de monde, professionnels ou non, s’approprie ce nouvel outil. Il est ainsi possible de trouver des podcasts sur des sujets très divers allant de la science à la politique en passant par l’érotisme ou le militantisme.

Ce mémoire s’intéresse aux podcasts de vulgarisation scientifique en sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) et en sciences et technologie santé (STS). L’intérêt a été porté sur les différences existantes entre les podcasts de SHS et les podcasts de STS à travers la problématique suivante : Les podcasts de sciences en SHS et STS ont-ils les mêmes formes expressives, les mêmes objectifs et les mêmes acteurs ?

Le développement de ce mémoire, s’est basé sur un corpus de huit podcasts, quatre podcasts de vulgarisation en Histoire et quatre podcasts de vulgarisation en santé. De nombreux podcasts étrangers traitent d’une discipline des STS alors qu’en France les podcasts ne sont pas spécialisés, un véritable manque de podcasts de STS français spécialisés dans une discipline a ainsi été observé.

Au contraire, les podcasts d’histoire sont très nombreux et révèlent l’engouement de cette discipline pour les français. Cela amené l’étude à s’intéresser à des podcasts de santé traitant parfois de sujets peu scientifiques comme le développement personnel. La question des créateurs et de la légitimité sont ainsi évoquées dans cette étude.

L’analyse des deux types de podcasts de science révèle qu’ils ont un enjeu similaire de prime abord : vulgariser leur discipline et diffuser des connaissances de manière informelle. En revanche, leur deuxième enjeu diffère. Les créateurs de podcasts d’histoire ont tendance a vouloir montrer la recherche en train de se faire, les nouvelles réflexions des chercheurs et de mettre ces derniers en valeur.

Les créateurs de podcasts de santé ont, quant à eux, tendance à vouloir faire agir leurs auditeurs grâce à des podcasts de conseils. La deuxième partie de l’analyse portent sur les méthodes différentes pour diffuser des connaissances. Les podcasts d’histoire se servent d’avantage des codes du roman pour transmettre du savoir.

Le récit, l’emploi d’un personnage principal, d’un narrateur, ou d’atmosphères travaillées servent à donner à l’auditeur l’impression qu’une histoire lui est racontée. De plus les outils de vulgarisation sont le plus souvent implicites, ce qui permet une diffusion non formelle des connaissances.

Au contraire, les podcasts de santé s’appuient sur de nombreux outils de vulgarisation explicites comme les synthèses, définitions, résumés et références scientifiques. Ils ne suivent pas les codes du roman et ont tendance à utiliser une écriture assez scolaire.

URL : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03472403

Social justice driving open access publishing: an African perspective

Posté le 29 avril 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Reggie Raju, Auliya Badrudeen

The OA movement is generally considered to have been founded for the truly philanthropic purpose of promoting equity and inclusivity in access to scholarship. For Africans, this meant the opening of the research ecosystem to marginalized research communities who could then freely make use of shared research to aid in the socio-economic development and emancipation of the continent.

However, this philanthropic purpose has been deviated from, leading instead to the disenfranchisement of the African research community. Through systemic inequalities embedded in the scholarly ecosystem, the publishing landscape has been northernised, with research from the global north sitting at the very top of the knowledge hierarchy to the exclusion of Africa and other parts of the global south.

For this reason, progressive open access practices and policies need to be adopted, with an emphasis on social justice as an impetus, to enhance the sharing and recognition of African scholarship, while also bridging the ‘research-exchange’ divide that exists between the global south and north.

Furthermore, advocates of open access must collaborate to create equal opportunities for African voices to participate in the scholarly landscape through the creation and dissemination of global south research. Thusly, the continental platform was developed by the University of Cape Town.

This platform was developed around the concept of a tenant model to act as a contributor to social justice-driven open access advocacy, and as a disruptor of the unjust knowledge hierarchies that exist.

URL : Social justice driving open access publishing: an African perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1910