Catégorie : EN

Catégories
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

Catégories
EN

Risk and uncertainty in digital preservation: A survey of CoreTrustSeal certified repositories

Author : Rebecca D. Frank

Digital repositories certified as trustworthy through systems such as CoreTrustSeal (CTS) are expected to demonstrate readiness for the ongoing work of long-term digital preservation.

Yet certification processes rest on largely positivistic assumptions about risk: that risks can be identified, classified, and quantified, and that all parties will interpret risk information consistently.

This article challenges that assumption by applying a social constructionist lens to examine how staff members from CTS certified repositories understand risk and characterize uncertainty in the context of digital preservation. Drawing on survey data from 88 respondents across the CTS community (a 54% response rate), the study uses qualitative coding to analyze open-ended responses about the most significant risks and uncertainties facing certified repositories.

Findings show that respondents understood risk in terms of concrete threats across five categories: finance, legal, organizational infrastructure, repository processes, and technical infrastructure.

Financial sustainability, staffing, and technical infrastructure were particularly prominent. Respondents characterized uncertainty in three areas: finance, data and infrastructure, and the Designated Community. Notably, sources of uncertainty were primarily external to the repository, and respondents frequently treated risk and uncertainty as overlapping or interchangeable concepts.

These findings reveal that even repositories that have passed an external audit continue to face significant interconnected threats, particularly around the ability to sustain funding, retain expertise, and maintain infrastructure over time.

The study contributes to information science scholarship by demonstrating that technical and procedural standards alone cannot address the complex challenges of digital preservation, and that attention to how practitioners construct meaning around risk is essential for improving both certification systems and preservation practice.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006261486056

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

Awareness of Predatory Journals and Open Access: an online survey among Italian Researchers

Authors : Silvia Maccarini, Núria Bautista-Puig, Eva Méndez

This study investigates Italian academics’ awareness, perceptions, and experiences of predatory publishing, a phenomenon recognised as a threat to research integrity and scholarly communication. An online survey of researchers affiliated with Italian universities and research institutes yielded 258 responses, which were analysed.

Results show that awareness of predatory publishing is high: almost half of respondents (47.9%) had discussed it with colleagues, and more than one-third had encountered it as authors, reviewers, or readers. Familiarity varies across dimensions, with predatory journals and spam emails being most recognised, and fraudulent websites and podcasts less so. 30% of participants reported personal experience of editorial misleading, mainly as authors, and 76% had received spam or phishing solicitations. Significant differences emerged by professional title and age, with senior researchers demonstrating greater awareness and greater exposure to training.

Most participants perceive predatory publishing as having a moderate or high impact on scientific integrity, but only half have received training in research ethics or use verification tools. Open-ended responses show concern about the “publish or perish” culture and the difficulty of distinguishing legitimate from predatory journals. The findings highlight awareness and vulnerability in the Italian academic publishing landscape.

URL : Awareness of Predatory Journals and Open Access: an online survey among Italian Researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-720

Catégories
EN

Assessing Researcher Data Sharing Practices Using Publicly Available Dataset Metadata: A Reproducible Workflow for Institutional Stakeholders

Authors : Danielle R. Kirsch, Isaac Wink

Introduction

Scholarly communities are experiencing increased emphasis on research data sharing and reuse. Given the range of available data repositories and variability in the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for individuals and institutions, aggregating datasets by researchers at a specific institution is a significant challenge. We developed a reproducible workflow to evaluate 1) data repository use by researchers at our institutions, 2) metrics of reuse, and 3) quality of metadata records.

Methods

We used the DataCite REST API to locate metadata records for datasets with creator affiliation names that matched our institutions. We performed substantial cleaning and deduplication before comparing repository use, citations, usage metrics, and metadata completeness.

Results

The most common data repositories were Dryad, Harvard Dataverse, figshare, Zenodo, ICPSR, and one institution’s institutional repository. View, download, and citation counts were available from a limited number of repositories, with some discrepancies between different citation reporting methods. PIDs were more frequently used for authors and affiliations than funders, and the inclusion of PIDs varied across repositories, with Dryad being the most consistent.

Discussion & Conclusion

Although broad trends in repository and PID use were similar between institutions, our analysis also surfaced examples that illustrate inconsistencies in metadata across repositories. Variable implementation of the DataCite metadata schema requires a significant amount of data cleaning to obtain meaningful results. Even then, incomplete metadata makes some datasets impossible to locate. Repositories, funders, researchers, and institutional open data advocates must coordinate to create complete and usable metadata that integrates datasets into the scholarship ecosystem.

URL : Assessing Researcher Data Sharing Practices Using Publicly Available Dataset Metadata: A Reproducible Workflow for Institutional Stakeholders

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.22913