Catégorie : EN

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Biological Repositories as Reproducibility Infrastructure: Enabling Reliable Science in the Biosciences

Author : Chonnettia Jones

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific progress, ensuring that discoveries can be verified, built upon, and translated into meaningful advancements.

In the biosciences, transparent data and code are necessary but not sufficient; reproducibility also requires reliable infrastructure with reliable access to rigorously characterized research materials.

Biorepositories play a pivotal role by archiving and safeguarding materials, meticulously curating provenance and metadata, providing visible indicators of material quality, and sustaining durable records that stand the test of time.

Working in collaboration, the research community and biorepositories can uphold the integrity of research by supporting research reproducibility, extending published findings to unlock the full potential of scientific research.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.a05ce2a0

URL : Biological Repositories as Reproducibility Infrastructure: Enabling Reliable Science in the Biosciences

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EN

Metadata conflicts and their impact on DataCite metadata completeness in disciplinary research data repositories

Author : Dorothea Strecker

This paper presents results from a study that investigates how eight disciplinary research data repositories from the geosciences and social sciences navigate metadata conflicts – conflicts in implementations of the same standard and inter-standard conflicts – and how these conflicts affect the completeness of DataCite metadata.

It combines results from analyzing DataCite metadata records, structural differences between three disciplinary metadata schemas and the DataCite Metadata Schema, and a direct comparison of two metadata records describing the same dataset.

The results show that both conflicts in implementations of the same standard and inter-standard conflicts contribute to incomplete DataCite metadata. In addition to inherent differences between the metadata schemas, workflows and conscious decisions by the repositories also contribute to these conflicts.

Some of these conflicts could be resolved by updated metadata crosswalks, emerging initiatives for retroactive collaborative metadata enrichment, the implementation of metadata application profiles or schema updates. Other conflicts can’t be resolved or are strongly connected to the repository mission.

The results also highlight that metadata completeness is multifaceted, and assessment requires careful consideration of context.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.25468

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EN

Scientific rigor beyond open science: Faculty perspectives on research quality and evaluation

Authors :  Holly Cordner, Gabrielle Y Garza, Isabelle Freiling

In recent years, policy reforms and funding mandates have accelerated the adoption of open science practices. These practices are increasingly being promoted and mandated to enhance transparency and replicability.

As such, they may serve as signals of the quality of a paper. However, transparency and replicability are only parts of what makes a study rigorous, and far less attention has been paid to how this emphasis on open science practices relates to the criteria researchers use to evaluate scientific rigor.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with tenure-line faculty across disciplines, we examine how researchers understand scientific rigor and how they interpret the growing use of open science practices as signals of quality. Faculty consistently valued open science for improving transparency and accessibility but emphasized a broader set of criteria they consider equally important for rigorous research, including theoretical grounding, appropriate methods, accurate claims, and ethical considerations.

Many noted that these dimensions of rigor are not always fully captured by open science frameworks or by journal badges that indicate adherence to open science practices. Faculty also expressed mixed views about the extent to which open science practices function as meaningful indicators of research quality across disciplines and methodologies.

Our findings suggest that while open science can strengthen scientific rigor, evaluation systems that treat transparency and replicability as prominent evaluative signals may affect perceptions of what constitutes rigorous research.

These findings have implications for the design and implementation of research evaluation frameworks that reflect the multidimensional and context-dependent nature of scientific rigor.

URL : Scientific rigor beyond open science: Faculty perspectives on research quality and evaluation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvag061

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EN

The future of scholarly blogs: Scholarly bloggers’ perspectives on long-term preservation

Authors : Catharina Ochsner, Heinz Pampel

Scholarly blogs are an important venue for scholarly communication; however, they are not yet integrated into the preservation workflows of digital research and information infrastructures, which places their long-term access at risk.

By using Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) dimensions of information infrastructure as a theoretical framework, in this study we investigate social and organizational factors that impact blog preservation and derive implications for the implementation of blogs into an information infrastructure.

We conducted and qualitatively analyzed 13 semi-structured interviews with scholarly bloggers to identify bloggers’ perceived challenges concerning blog preservation and their requirements for an information infrastructure tasked with preserving scholarly blogs. We found that participants named or indirectly described existing infrastructure institutions and their services that are already working toward preserving the scholarly record.

The findings suggest extending the scope of existing infrastructure institutions to include scholarly blog preservation.

URL : The future of scholarly blogs: Scholarly bloggers’ perspectives on long-term preservation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.70126

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EN

The Limited Communication of Corrections to Users of Scholarly Platforms

Authors : Wytske M. Hepkema, Frédérique Bordignon, Willem Halffman

Formal corrections of research publications should be clearly communicated to users of the scholarly literature, especially when these corrections have consequences for reported knowledge.

However, the information that a publication was corrected is not always shared and indicated clearly. To test correction communication, we formed a corpus of publications with corrections most likely consequential to their reported knowledge.

To this end, we selected 3177 publications that were recently corrected according to Crossref and that received at least two comments on PubPeer. We used this corpus as a probe to assess correction communication on a range of scholarly platforms.

The majority of these platforms does not indicate the presence of corrections together with the entry for these publications: Web of Science, OpenAlex, Dimensions, Google Scholar, Lens, Mendeley, Zotero, Endnote and Elicit.

Those that do indicate the existence of corrections, do so for nearly all corrected publications as follows: Scopus 90.8%, PubMed 98.7%, EuropePMC 98.8%, Scite.ai 99.7% and the journal’s webpage 94.4%. Even when the presence of a correction is communicated, this is not always indicated clearly.

Readers of the scholarly literature might miss corrections when they are communicated under a generic header such as ‘referred to by’, or only indicated by a small line of text in the same colours as the rest of the page.

We provide suggestions for improved communication of corrections through better integration of information across platforms, improved labelling on platforms and the development of correction communication standards.

URL : The Limited Communication of Corrections to Users of Scholarly Platforms

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2103

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EN

Paying for Publication with Peer Review Design and Simulation of a Fee-Free, Credit-Based Open Access Journal for Information Technology

Author : Murat Ozer

Open access publishing has moved much of the cost of scholarly communication from readers to authors, while the labor of peer review remains unpaid and unevenly shared.

This paper describes the design of Quorum: An Open Journal of Information Technology (this http URL), a journal that charges neither readers nor authors and uses peer review as its currency instead. Every first complete review a scholar writes on a manuscript earns one credit, and one credit pays for one submission.

Each manuscript receives three double-blind reviews from reviewers matched automatically by expertise, and editorial decisions follow published rules rather than editor discretion.

The paper documents the credit ledger, a bootstrapping mechanism called the genesis block, a reviewer search that widens after seven days and opens the paper to volunteers, the decision rules, and the integrity safeguards. An agent-based simulation, run for two simulated years with 40 replications per scenario, evaluates these choices.

Without the genesis block, no paper was submitted in any replication. With it, a community growing from 40 to about 330 members submitted about 603 papers, and papers waited a median of 7 days for a full review panel.

The day-7 escalation had a modest effect in a large community but a decisive one in a small community of about 60 members, where removing it left 48.8% of papers without a panel after 60 days, compared with 4.6% with it. Unspent credits also accumulated to about 3.7 per member after two years, which points to a policy choice the journal will face as it grows.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.33864

Catégories
EN

Research quality metrics as a complement to bibliometrics: an opinion paper

Authors : Harald Hannerz, Kristian Schultz Hansen, Jan Hyld Pejtersen, Helene Kless Willadsen

Substantial proportions of research investment may be wasted due to flawed study design, biased reporting, and publication bias, raising concerns about how research performance is evaluated.

Despite this, current assessment systems rely heavily on bibliometric indicators such as publication counts, co-authorship, and citation metrics, which do not reliably reflect research quality or scientific rigor.

In this opinion paper, we argue that such indicators may reward practices that undermine the accumulation of reliable knowledge, including p-hacking, selective reporting, and underpowered study designs, while undervaluing essential contributions such as replication research.

We propose that bibliometric measures should be complemented by transparent and auditable research quality metrics, including indicators of reproducibility, statistical power, risk of bias, and adherence to reporting standards.

We further suggest that recent advances in large language models may facilitate the scalable implementation of such metrics. Adopting quality-focused indicators could improve research evaluation and help reduce avoidable research waste.

URL : Research quality metrics as a complement to bibliometrics: an opinion paper

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-026-05840-6