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Peer review: The current landscape and future trends

Posté le 26 janvier 2016 par Hans Dillaerts

This paper is based on research commissioned by the Wellcome Trust in 2015 and catalogues current initiatives and trends in the systems and processes surrounding peer review. It considers issues such as open and interactive reviews, post-publication comments and ratings, and the platforms provided by both publishers and other organisations to support such activity; third-party peer review platforms; and measures from publishers and others to provide more recognition and rewards for peer reviewers. It also speculates on likely key trends in peer review for the future.

URL : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1008/abstract

Peer review in megajournals compared with traditional scholarly journals: Does it make a difference?

Posté le 26 janvier 2016 par Hans Dillaerts

A megajournal is an open-access journal that publishes any manuscript that presents scientifically trustworthy empirical results, without asking about the potential scientific contribution prior to publication. Megajournals have rapidly increased their output and are currently publishing around 50,000 articles per year.

We report on a small pilot study in which we looked at the citation distributions for articles in megajournals compared with journals with traditional peer review, which also evaluate articles for contribution and novelty.We found that elite journals with very low acceptance rates have far fewer articles with no or few citations, but that the long tail of articles with two citations or less was actually bigger in a sample of selective traditional journals in comparison with megajournals.

This indicates the need for more systematic studies, because the results raise many questions as to how efficiently the current peer review system in reality fulfils its filtering function.

URL : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1007/abstract

Open Access Publishing of Health Research: Does Open Access Publishing Facilitate the Translation of Research into Health Policy and Practice?

Posté le 24 janvier 2016 par Hans Dillaerts

Health practitioners and policy makers translate health research into practice and policy. However, these end users have limited access to full versions of peer-reviewed literature in subscription journals. Thus, the essential information bypasses the people it is designed to help and the health benefits of medical research are limited and delayed. Open access (OA) publishing is one strategy to facilitate the translation of research to improve health. This review explores the evidence that OA publishing is an effective strategy to facilitate the translation of research and improve health.

The review examines citation benefit, knowledge translation, diffusion impact, self-archiving and regional responses, and found entrenched views about OA publishing but little empirical research.The many biases and flaws in published research lead to a high level of waste and limit the ability to find innovative solutions to the burgeoning health costs. Evidence is presented here that OA publishing would facilitate a reduction in these flaws and biases, reduce waste in research and facilitate innovation. Although there are positive signs of change, more action and more research are needed.

URL : Open Access Publishing of Health Research: Does Open Access Publishing Facilitate the Translation of Research into Health Policy and Practice?

URL : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/1/2

Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads

Posté le 24 janvier 2016 par Hans Dillaerts

Researchers benefit from an increasing array of tools to enhance direct communication and the dissemination of their research findings. These include Open Access repositories, Open Access journals, or hybrid publishing. For some years, researchers have been using new ways to communicate and share their work by using academic social networks.

In an attempt to foster the development of Open Access in France, the French consortium COUPERIN (Unified Consortium of Higher Education and Research Organizations for Access to Numerical Publications) proposed that academic social networks could be used to convince researchers of becoming more involved in Open Access.

To test this hypothesis, a nationwide survey was launched in 2014 to explore whether and how these academic social networks are used to share content, but also how they compare to other Open Access classic tools. Within a month (20 May to 20 June), 1,898 researchers answered this 28-question survey. It was fully completed by 1,698 of them. This provides COUPERIN with considerable data for analysis. The respondents roughly reflect the composition of the French academic community in terms of gender and research fields, with a slight overrepresentation of young researchers/ PhD candidates.

This survey does not, however, cover the in-depth opinions of researchers on Open Access and academic social networks. It therefore only presents general tendencies. Nonetheless, the survey gives many indications as to how researchers apply Open Access. In addition, it shows how they feel about the usefulness of these networks compared to repositories when efficiently disseminating their work. This survey also takes the differences between disciplines into account and characterizes behaviour and opinions according to the different disciplinary communities and their research practices.

Finally, this survey allows us to define the main characteristics of a tool which could meet French researchers’ needs for scientific communication. The components of such an ideal tool dedicated to Open Science could include efficient repositories to easily disseminate work and improve visibility, a sharing network and the scientific stamp of peer-review.

URL : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.10131/

Bibliometric and benchmark analysis of gold open access in Spain: big output and little impact

Posté le 24 janvier 2016 par Hans Dillaerts

This bibliometric study analyzes the research output produced by Spain during the 2005-2014 time period in Open Access (OA) journals indexed in Web of Science. The aim of the paper is to determine if papers published in Open Access journals contribute to the improvement of citation impact and collaboration indicators in Spanish research.

The results are shown by scientific areas and compared with 17 European countries. Spain is the second highest ranking European country with gold OA publication output and the fourth highest in Open Access output (9%). In Spain OA output is especially high in the fields of Arts and Humanities (28%). Spain’s normalized citation impact in Open access (0.72) is lower than the world average and that of the main European countries. Finally, we discuss how these results differ from the so-called Open Access citation advantage.

URL : http://www.elprofesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/2016/ene/03.html

Tweets Do Measure Non – Citational Intellectual Impact

Posté le 19 janvier 2016 par Hans Dillaerts

Purpose

The aim of the paper is to identify the motive behind the social media indicators in focus to tweets and attempts to identify what is measured or indicated by tweets, based on these motives.

Design/methodology/approach

Documents with non zero tweets were manually collected from a source of 5 journals – Nature Biotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Physics, Nature Chemistry and Nature Communications for the period January 2014 – October 2014 so as to depict the contemporary trend, as tweets tends to have L shaped curve in time-wise distribution.

Findings

Investigations suggest that the motives behind the tweets are research reach, research acceptance and research usage. Further analysis revealed that the motive behind self – tweets are research visibility, which is one of the attributes of social media and therefore self tweets may not be a complex problem as expected seeing that documents are self tweeted not more than once in most cases.

Furthermore, identifying and classifying tweets based on users – Publishers, Frequent tweeters who apparently tweet all documents of an issue and Authors will increase the effectiveness of altmetrics in research evaluation. It was also found that association between subjects can be identified by the analysis of tweets pattern among subjects.

Originality/value

Study proposes an overall hierarchical structure of impact based on the change/advancement instigated. The study confirms that tweets do measure non – academic intellectual impact that is not captured by traditional metrics.

URL : http://www.itlit.net/v2n2art2.pdf