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Coronavirus mapping in scientific publications: When science advances rapidly and collectively, is access to this knowledge open to society?

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Authors : Simone Belli, Rogério Mugnaini, Joan Baltà, Ernest Abadal

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating a global health emergency. Mapping this health emergency in scientific publications demands multiple approaches to obtain a picture as complete as possible. To progress in the knowledge of this pandemic and to control its effects, international collaborations between researchers are essentials, as well as having open and immediate access to scientific publications, what we called “coopetition”.

Our main objectives are to identify the most productive countries in coronavirus publications, to analyse the international scientific collaboration on this topic, and to study the proportion and typology of open accessibility to these publications.

We have analyzed 18,875 articles indexed in Web of Science. We performed the descriptive statistical analysis in order to explore the performance of the more prolific countries and organizations, as well as paying attention to the last 2 years. Registers have been analyzed separately via the VOSviewer software, drawing a network of links among countries and organizations to identify the starred countries and organizations, and the strongest links of the net.

We have explored the capacity of researchers to generate scientific knowledge about a health crisis emergency, and their global capacity to collaborate among them in a global emergency. We consider that science is moving rapidly to find solutions to international health problems but access to this knowledge by society is not so quick due to several limitations (open access policies, corporate interests, etc.).

We have observed that papers from China in the last 3 months (from January 2020 to March 2020) have a strong impact compared with papers published in years before. The United States and China are the major producers of documents of our sample, followed by all European countries, especially the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

At the same time, the leading role of Saudi Arabia, Canada or South Korea should be noted, with a significant number of documents submitted but very different dynamics of international collaboration.

The proportion of international collaboration is growing in all countries in 2019–2020, which contrasts with the situation of the last two decades. The organizations providing the most documents to the sample are mostly Chinese.

The percentage of open access articles on coronavirus for the period 2001–2020 is 59.2% but if we focus in 2020 the figures increase up to 91.4%, due to the commitment of commercial publishers with the emergency.

URL : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03590-7

Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: an Open Access Altmetric Advantage

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Author : Michael Taylor

The last decade has seen two significant phenomena emerge in research communication: the rise of open access (OA) publishing, and evidence of online sharing in the form of altmetrics. There has been limited examination of the effect of OA on online sharing for journal articles, and little for books.

This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley.

Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact.

URL  : https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10442

Preliminary analysis of COVID-19 academic information patterns: a call for open science in the times of closed borders

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Authors : Jan Homolak, Ivan Kodvanj, D. Virag

The Pandemic of COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 motivated the scientific community to work together in order to gather, organize, process and distribute data on the novel biomedical hazard. Here, we analyzed how the scientific community responded to this challenge by quantifying distribution and availability patterns of the academic information related to COVID-19.

The aim of this study was to assess the quality of the information flow and scientific collaboration, two factors we believe to be critical for finding new solutions for the ongoing pandemic.

The RISmed R package, and a custom Python script were used to fetch metadata on articles indexed in PubMed and published on Rxiv preprint server. Scopus was manually searched and the metadata was exported in BibTex file. Publication rate and publication status, affiliation and author count per article, and submission-to-publication time were analysed in R. Biblioshiny application was used to create a world collaboration map.

Preliminary data suggest that COVID-19 pandemic resulted in generation of a large amount of scientific data, and demonstrates potential problems regarding the information velocity, availability, and scientific collaboration in the early stages of the pandemic. More specifically, the results indicate precarious overload of the standard publication systems, significant problems with data availability and apparent deficient collaboration.

In conclusion, we believe the scientific community could have used the data more efficiently in order to create proper foundations for finding new solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moreover, we believe we can learn from this on the go and adopt open science principles and a more mindful approach to COVID-19-related data to accelerate the discovery of more efficient solutions. We take this opportunity to invite our colleagues to contribute to this global scientific collaboration by publishing their findings with maximal transparency.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03587-2

Models for Engaging Liaisons in Research Data Services

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Authors : Megan Sapp Nelson, Abigail Goben

Research data services in academic libraries is often perceived as the purview of liaison librarians. A variety of models has emerged by which these services may be developed or implemented.

These include hierarchical models and those based more on individual interest. Of critical importance with any model, however, is the identification of support and opportunities for engagement from library administration and management in order to grow and assess the implementation of research data services.

URL : Models for Engaging Liaisons in Research Data Services

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2382

Revealing Reviewers’ Identities as Part of Open Peer Review and Analysis of the Review Reports

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Authors :  Cezary Bolek, Dejan Marolov, Monika Bolek, Jovan Shopovski

This research article is aimed at comparing review reports, in which the identity of the reviewers is revealed to the authors of the papers, with those where the reviewers decided to remain anonymous.

The review reports are gathered as part of the peer review process of the European Scientific Journal (ESJ). This journal maintains a single-blind peer review procedure and optional open review. Reviewers are familiar with the names of the authors but not vice versa. When sending the review reports, the reviewers can opt to reveal their identity to the authors.

The sample of 343 review reports from members of the ESJ editorial board, gathered within the period of May to July 2019, were analysed. The data analysis was performed using the Python programing language based on NumPy, Pandas, and Scipy packages.

Half of the reviewers decided to choose the open option and reveal their names to the authors of the papers. The other half remained anonymous. The results show that female reviewers more often decide to remain anonymous than their male colleagues. However, there is no significant difference in the review reports on the basis of gender or country of institutional affiliation of the reviewers.

Revealing identities did not make a difference in the reviewers’ point appraisal in the review reports. This difference was not significant. However, a majority of the reviewers who recommended rejection in their review reports were not willing to reveal their identities.

Even more, those reviewers who revealed their identity were more likely to recommend in their review reports acceptance without revision or a minor revision.

URL : Revealing Reviewers’ Identities as Part of Open Peer Review and Analysis of the Review Reports

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10347

Theoretical Aspects of Scholarly Publishing about the Internet in Spanish Communication Journals

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Authors : Rainer Rubira-García, Silvia Margarita Baldiris-Navarro, Jacqueline Venet-Gutiérrez, Silvia Magro-Vela

Theoretical aspects of scholarly publishing about the Internet in communication sciences in Spain have received little attention. The present text analyses scientific framework, categories, concepts and keywords used in research, collected from the most relevant specialized Spanish journals in the field, as well as research objectives that are pursued in connection to communication levels of study and types of data.

A content analysis of a representative sample of 227 scientific articles was done in the five leading Spanish journals in communication in the period 1995–2015, in which the academic interesting on Internet as an object of study was consolidated.

The results show a predominance of descriptive theoretical frameworks and a hegemony of journalism as an academic reference. Nevertheless, there is an increase complexity out of the mass media field.

The research on the Internet in the communication field is presented as a reflexive opportunity to understand interdisciplinarity and the way this acquires epistemological consistence in the scientific discourse.

URL : Theoretical Aspects of Scholarly Publishing about the Internet in Spanish Communication Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8030042

PRINCIPIA: a Decentralized Peer-Review Ecosystem

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Authors : Andrea Mambrini, Andrea Baronchelli, Michele Starnini, Daniele Marinazzo, Manlio De Domenico

Peer review is a cornerstone of modern scientific endeavor. However, there is growing consensus that several limitations of the current peer review system, from lack of incentives to reviewers to lack of transparency, risks to undermine its benefits.

Here, we introduce the PRINCIPIA (http://www.principia.network/) framework for peer-review of scientific outputs (e.g., papers, grant proposals or patents).

The framework allows key players of the scientific ecosystem — including existing publishing groups — to create and manage peer-reviewed journals, by building a free market for reviews and publications. PRINCIPIA’s referees are transparently rewarded according to their efforts and the quality of their reviews.

PRINCIPIA also naturally allows to recognize the prestige of users and journals, with an intrinsic reputation system that does not depend on third-parties. PRINCIPIA re-balances the power between researchers and publishers, stimulates valuable assessments from referees, favors a fair competition between journals, and reduces the costs to access research output and to publish.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09011