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Being a deliberate prey of a predator: Researchers’ thoughts after having published in predatory journal

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Authors: Najmeh Shaghaei, Charlotte Wien, Jakob Pavl Holck, Anita L. Thiesen, Ole Ellegaard, Evgenios Vlachos, Thea Marie Drachen

A central question concerning scientific publishing is how researchers select journals to which they submit their work, since the choice of publication channel can make or break researchers.

The gold-digger mentality developed by some publishers created the so-called predatory journals that accept manuscripts for a fee with little peer review. The literature claims that mainly researchers from low-ranked universities in developing countries publish in predatory journals.

We decided to challenge this claim using the University of Southern Denmark as a case. We ran the Beall’s List against our research registration database and identified 31 possibly predatory publications from a set of 6,851 publications within 2015-2016.

A qualitative research interview revealed that experienced researchers from the developed world publish in predatory journals mainly for the same reasons as do researchers from developing countries: lack of awareness, speed and ease of the publication process, and a chance to get elsewhere rejected work published.

However, our findings indicate that the Open Access potential and a larger readership outreach were also motives for publishing in open access journals with quick acceptance rates.

URL : Being a deliberate prey of a predator: Researchers’ thoughts after having published in predatory journal

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10259

Creating Structured Linked Data to Generate Scholarly Profiles: A Pilot Project using Wikidata and Scholia

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Authors : Mairelys Lemus-Rojas, Jere D. Odell

INTRODUCTION

Wikidata, a knowledge base for structured linked data, provides an open platform for curating scholarly communication data. Because all elements in a Wikidata entry are linked to defining elements and metadata, other web systems can harvest and display the data in meaningful ways.

Thus, Wikidata has the capacity to serve as the data source for faculty profiles. Scholia is an example of how third-party tools can leverage the power of Wikidata to provisde faculty profiles and bibliographic, data-driven visualizations.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

In this article, we share our methods for contributing to Wikidata and displaying the data with Scholia.

We deployed these methods as part of a pilot project in which we contributed data about a small but unique school on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus, the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

NEXT STEPS

Following the completion of our pilot project, we aim to find additional methods for contributing large data collections to Wikidata. Specifically, we seek to contribute scholarly communication data that the library already maintains in other systems.

We are also facilitating Wikidata edit-a-thons to increase the library’s familiarity with the knowledge base and our capacity to contribute to the site.

URL : Creating Structured Linked Data to Generate Scholarly Profiles: A Pilot Project using Wikidata and Scholia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2272

The principles of tomorrow’s university

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Authors : Daniel S. Katz, Gabrielle Allen, Lorena A. Barba, Devin R. Berg, Holly Bik, Carl Boettiger, Christine L. Borgman, C. Titus Brown, Stuart Buck, Randy Burd, Anita de Waard, Martin Paul Eve, Brian E. Granger, Josh Greenberg, Adina Howe, Bill Howe, May Khanna, Timothy L. Killeen, Matthew Mayernik, Erin McKiernan, Chris Mentzel, Nirav Merchant, Kyle E. Niemeyer, Laura Noren, Sarah M. Nusser, Daniel A. Reed, Edward Seidel, MacKenzie Smith, Jeffrey R. Spies, Matt Turk, John D. Van Horn, Jay Walsh

In the 21st Century, research is increasingly data- and computation-driven. Researchers, funders, and the larger community today emphasize the traits of openness and reproducibility.

In March 2017, 13 mostly early-career research leaders who are building their careers around these traits came together with ten university leaders (presidents, vice presidents, and vice provosts), representatives from four funding agencies, and eleven organizers and other stakeholders in an NIH- and NSF-funded one-day, invitation-only workshop titled “Imagining Tomorrow’s University.”

Workshop attendees were charged with launching a new dialog around open research – the current status, opportunities for advancement, and challenges that limit sharing.

The workshop examined how the internet-enabled research world has changed, and how universities need to change to adapt commensurately, aiming to understand how universities can and should make themselves competitive and attract the best students, staff, and faculty in this new world.

During the workshop, the participants re-imagined scholarship, education, and institutions for an open, networked era, to uncover new opportunities for universities to create value and serve society.

They expressed the results of these deliberations as a set of 22 principles of tomorrow’s university across six areas: credit and attribution, communities, outreach and engagement, education, preservation and reproducibility, and technologies.

Activities that follow on from workshop results take one of three forms. First, since the workshop, a number of workshop authors have further developed and published their white papers to make their reflections and recommendations more concrete.

These authors are also conducting efforts to implement these ideas, and to make changes in the university system.

Second, we plan to organise a follow-up workshop that focuses on how these principles could be implemented.

Third, we believe that the outcomes of this workshop support and are connected with recent theoretical work on the position and future of open knowledge institutions.

URL : The principles of tomorrow’s university

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17425.1

Access to academic libraries: an indicator of openness?

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Authors  : Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Katie Wilson

Introduction

Open access to digital research output is increasing, but academic library policies can place restrictions on public access to libraries. This paper reports on a preliminary study to investigate the correlation between academic library access policies and institutional positions of openness to knowledge.

Method

This primarily qualitative study used document and data analysis to examine the content of library access/use policies of 12 academic institutions in eight countries. The outcomes were statistically correlated with institutional open access publication policies and practices.

Analysis

We used an automated search tool together with manual searching to retrieve web-based library access policies, then categorised and counted the levels and conditions of public access. We compared scores for institutional library access features, open access features and percentages of open access publications.

Results

Academic library policies may suggest open public access but multi-layered user categories, privileges and fees charged can inhibit access, with disparities in openness emerging between library policies and institutional open access policies.

Conclusion. As open access publishing options and mandates expand, physical entry and access to print and electronic resources in academic libraries is contracting. This conflicts with global library and information commitments to open access to knowledge.

DOI : https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:21881/

Factors Influencing Cities’ Publishing Efficiency

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Author : Csomós György

Purpose

Recently, a vast number of scientific publications have been produced in cities in emerging countries. It has long been observed that the publication output of Beijing has exceeded that of any other city in the world, including such leading centres of science as Boston, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo.

Researchers have suggested that, instead of focusing on cities’ total publication output, the quality of the output in terms of the number of highly cited papers should be examined. However, in the period from 2014 to 2016, Beijing produced as many highly cited papers as Boston, London, or New York.

In this paper, another method is proposed to measure cities’ publishing performance by focusing on cities’ publishing efficiency (i.e., the ratio of highly cited articles to all articles produced in that city).

Design/methodology/approach

First, 554 cities are ranked based on their publishing efficiency, then some general factors influencing cities’ publishing efficiency are revealed. The general factors examined in this paper are as follows: the linguistic environment of cities, cities’ economic development level, the location of excellent organisations, cities’ international collaboration patterns, and their scientific field profile.

Furthermore, the paper examines the fundamental differences between the general factors influencing the publishing efficiency of the top 100 most efficient cities and the bottom 100 least efficient cities.

Findings

Based on the research results, the conclusion can be drawn that a city’s publishing efficiency will be high if meets the following general conditions: it is in a country in the Anglosphere–Core; it is in a high-income country; it is home to top-ranked universities and/or world-renowned research institutions; researchers affiliated with that city most intensely collaborate with researchers affiliated with cities in the United States, Germany, England, France, Canada, Australia, and Italy; and the most productive scientific disciplines of highly cited articles are published in high-impact multidisciplinary journals, disciplines in health sciences (especially general internal medicine and oncology), and disciplines in natural sciences (especially physics, astronomy, and astrophysics).

Research limitations

It is always problematic to demarcate the boundaries of cities (e.g., New York City vs. Greater New York), and regarding this issue there is no consensus among researchers.

The Web of Science presents the name of cities in the addresses reported by the authors of publications. In this paper cities correspond to the spatial units between the country/state level and the institution level as indicated in the Web of Science.

Furthermore, it is necessary to highlight that the Web of Science is biased towards English-language journals and journals published in the field of biomedicine. These facts may influence the outcome of the research.

Practical implications

Publishing efficiency, as an indicator, shows how successful a city is at the production of science. Naturally, cities have limited opportunities to compete for components of the science establishment (e.g., universities, hospitals).

However, cities can compete to attract innovation-oriented companies, high tech firms, and R&D facilities of multinational companies by for example establishing science parks. The positive effect of this process on the city’s performance in science can be observed in the example of Beijing, which publishing efficiency has been increased rapidly.

Originality/value

Previous scientometric studies have examined cities’ publication output in terms of the number of papers, or the number of highly cited papers, which are largely size dependent indicators; however this paper attempts to present a more quality-based approach.

URL : Factors Influencing Cities’ Publishing Efficiency

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2018-0014

Perception of postgraduate students towards open access publication in some selected institutions in Malaysia

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Author : James Oluwaseyi Hodonu-Wusu

This article investigates perception of postgraduate students towards open access publication in two research institutions in Malaysia. A descriptive survey was used in the study which involves 121 respondents from 500 sample population sent instrument to from both Universities.

A simple random techniques was used for the study. Data were analyzed using frequency counts, percentages, mean and standard deviation, independent sample t-test and One-way analysis of variance tests (ANOVA) was employed to determine if there is a statistically significant mean differences in perceived usefulness and perceived effectiveness of OA publications between ages of postgraduate students.

The findings revealed why postgraduate scholars should embrace Open Access publication for wider visibility and reproducibility of academic research and development.

The results also shows that majority of the respondents were of mean age of 2.67 and highest age bracket was between 26-35 years. However, the sample size of the survey was quite small and further research is needed to determine if similar findings are obtained when other researchers are included in the sample.

URL : Perception of postgraduate students towards open access publication in some selected institutions in Malaysia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/a4mjz

Automatically Annotating Articles Towards Opening and Reusing Transparent Peer Reviews

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Authors : Afshin Sadeghi, Sarven Capadisli, Johannes Wilm, Christoph Lange, Philipp Mayr

An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final article, or combinations of these.

Reasons for open peer review include giving better credit to reviewers and enabling readers to better appraise the quality of a publication. In most cases, the full, unstructured text of an open review is published next to the full, unstructured text of the article reviewed.

This approach prevents human readers from getting a quick impression of the quality of parts of an article, and it does not easily support secondary exploitation, e.g., for scientometrics on reviews.

While document formats have been proposed for publishing structured articles including reviews, integrated tool support for entire open peer review workflows resulting in such documents is still scarce.

We present AR-Annotator, the Automatic Article and Review Annotator which employs a semantic information model of an article and its reviews, using semantic markup and unique identifiers for all entities of interest.

The fine-grained article structure is not only exposed to authors and reviewers but also preserved in the published version. We publish articles and their reviews in a Linked Data representation and thus maximize their reusability by third-party applications.

We demonstrate this reusability by running quality-related queries against the structured representation of articles and their reviews.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01027