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Dialogicity in Individual and Institutional Scientific Blogs

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Author : Marina Bondi

The paper focuses on variation across institutional and individual scientific blogs, i.e., blogs that are managed by journals, magazines or associations involved in the dissemination of scientific information and blogs that are managed by individual researchers.

Using comparable corpora of posts from different scientific disciplines, look in particular at markers of dialogicity, i.e., the representation of participants (markers of self-reference, reader-reference, as well as representation of the scientific community and markers of attribution), markers of communicative action (organizational units and metastatements), and evaluative dialogue (evaluative lexis and dialogic contraction or expansion).

Concordance analysis of keywords and key-phrases (as calculated by Wordsmith Tools 8.0) shows that blogs managed by individual scientists emphasize personal voice and interpersonal elements, while institutional blogs are comparatively more informational.

Dialogicity markers are shown to contribute to defining how bloggers manage subjective and intersubjective positioning and construct their credibility, thus defining the nature of their relation to the audience and ultimately the functions of blogging.

URL : Dialogicity in Individual and Institutional Scientific Blogs

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010009

 

To protect and to serve: developing a road map for research data management services

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Authors: Andrea Chiarelli, Neil Beagrie, Lotte Boon, Ruth Mallalieu, Rob Johnson, Amy Warner May, Rowan Wilso

Research Data Management (RDM) has become a major issue for universities over the last decade. This case study outlines the review of RDM services carried out at the University of Oxford in partnership with external consultants between November 2019 and November 2020.

It aims to describe and discuss the processes in undertaking a university-wide review of services supporting RDM and developing a future road map for them, with a strong emphasis on the design processes, methodological approaches and infographics used. The future road map developed is a live document, which the consulting team handed over to the University at the end of the consultation process.

It provides a suggested RDM action plan for the University that will continue to evolve and be iterated in the light of additional internal costings, available resources and reprioritization in the budget cycle for each academic year.

It is hoped that the contents of this case study will be useful to other research-intensive universities with an interest in developing and planning RDM services to support their researchers.

URL : To protect and to serve: developing a road map for research data management services

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.566

Why do journals discontinue? A study of Australian ceased journals

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Authors : Hamid R. Jamali, Simon Wakeling, Alireza Abbasi

Little is known about why journals discontinue despite its significant implications. We present an analysis of 140 Australian journals that ceased from 2011 to mid-2021 and present the results of a survey of editors of 53 of them. The death age of journals was 19.7 (median = 16) with 57% being 10 years or older.

About 54% of them belonged to educational institutions and 34% to non-profit organizations. In terms of subject, 75% of the journals belonged to social sciences, humanities and arts. The survey showed that funding was an important reason for discontinuation, and lack of quality submission and lack of support from the owners of the journal also played a role.

Too much reliance on voluntary works appeared to be an issue for editorial processes. The dominant metric culture in the research environment and pressure for journals to perform well in journal rankings negatively affect local journals in attracting quality submissions.

A fifth of journals indicated that they did not have a plan for the preservation of articles at the time of publication and the current availability of the content of ceased journals appeared to be sub-optimal in many cases with reliance on the website of ceased journals or web-archive platforms.

URL : Why do journals discontinue? A study of Australian ceased journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1448

Innovations in peer review in scholarly publishing: a meta-summary

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Authors : Helen Buckley Woods, Johanna Brumberg, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Stephen Pinfield, Ludo Waltman

Background

There are currently numerous innovations in peer review and quality assurance in scholarly publishing. The Research on Research Institute conducted a programme of co-produced projects investigating these innovations.

This literature review was part of one such project ‘Experiments in peer review’ (Kaltenbrunner et al, 2022), which created an inventory and framework of peer review innovations. The aim of this literature review was to aid the development of the inventory by identifying innovations in peer review reported in the scholarly literature and by providing a summary of the different approaches.

Methods

This meta-summary is based on data identified from Web of Science and Scopus limited from 2010 to 2021. A total of 247 papers were screened, with 6 review articles chosen for the focus of the literature review. Items were selected that described approaches to innovating peer review or illustrated examples.

Results

The summary of innovations are drawn from 6 review articles: Bruce et al (2016); Tennant et al (2017); Burley (2017); Horbach and Halffman (2018); Tennant (2018); Barroga (2020). The innovations are divided into three high-level categories: approaches to peer review, reviewer focussed initiatives and technology to support peer review with sub-categories of results presented in tabular form and summarised. A summary of all innovations found is also presented.

Conclusions

From a simple synthesis of the review authors’ conclusions, three key messages are presented: observations on current practice; authors’ views on the implications of innovations in peer review; and calls for action in peer review research and practice.

URL : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qaksd/

Article Processing Charges, Altmetrics and Citation Impact: Is there an economic rationale?

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Authors : Abdelghani Maddi, David Sapinho

The present study aims to analyze 1) the relationship between Citation Normalized Score of scientific publications and Article Processing Charges (APCs) of Gold Open Access (OA) publications 2) the determinants of APCs.

To do so, we used APCs information provided by the OpenAPC database, citation scores of publications from the WoS database and, for Altmetrics, data from Altmetrics.com database, over the period from 2006 to 2019 for 83,752 articles published in 4751 journals belonging to 267 distinct publishers.

Results show that contrary to common belief, paying high APCs does not necessarily increase the impact of publications. First, large publishers with high impact are not the most expensive. Second, publishers with the highest APCs are not necessarily the best in terms of impact.

Correlation between APCs and impact is moderate. Regarding the determinants, results indicate that APCs are on average 50% higher in hybrid journals than in full OA journals. The results also suggest that Altmetrics do not have a great impact: OA articles that have garnered the most attention on internet are articles with relatively low APCs.

Another interesting result is that the “number of readers” indicator is more effective as it is more correlated with classic bibliometrics indicators than the Altmetrics score.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03576911

The Essence and Transcendence of Scientific Publishing

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Authors : José L. Medina-Franco, Edgar López-López

Disseminating the results of scientific research in various forms (typically, peer-reviewed papers, conferences, and so on) nurtures and shapes the advancement of science. Scientific publishing is highly attached to the four well-known Mertonian norms and values that comprise the character or ethos of modern science, namely: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (Merton, 1973).

This is particularly true for publications that follow a rigorous peer-review and editorial process. Alongside dissemination of science that arguably is the primary reason for scientific publishing, it has other scientific, academic, and professional benefits on the large.

However, the pressure of publishing as a documented proof of productivity in academic and other professional settings has led to the “publish or perish’ aphorism (Neill, 2008; Publish or perish, 2010). In many cases, such paradigms obscure or alter the actual reasons and motivations for publishing, making it a “survival mechanism.”

This manuscript aims to share the authors’ opinions and revisit the right and fundamental reasons for scientific publishing. This Opinion is mainly directed to the students and young researchers that sometimes struggle at the beginning to organize, plan, and develop a manuscript.

The younger generations (and other more advanced or senior researchers) should consider scientific publishing as more than a survival mechanism to not perish, because such a focused motivation is counterproductive and burdens these initial steps.

Here, we highlight several other valid and collateral reasons for publishing beyond academic survival. Other important aspects of scientific publishing are not addressed in detail here, such as peer-review, the cost associated with open access, metrics to evaluate and rank the journals’ quality, and ethics in publishing. Instead, they are mentioned and discussed in the context of the primary goals and collateral benefits of publishing.

URL : The Essence and Transcendence of Scientific Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.822453

Examining linguistic shifts between preprints and publications

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Authors : David N. Nicholson, Vincent Rubinetti, Dongbo Hu, Marvin Thielk, Lawrence E. Hunter, Casey S. Greene

Preprints allow researchers to make their findings available to the scientific community before they have undergone peer review. Studies on preprints within bioRxiv have been largely focused on article metadata and how often these preprints are downloaded, cited, published, and discussed online.

A missing element that has yet to be examined is the language contained within the bioRxiv preprint repository. We sought to compare and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical text as a whole as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents.

The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supporting information sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model.

We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint–peer-reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint.

We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer-reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish.

Lastly, we constructed a web application (https://greenelab.github.io/preprint-similarity-search/) that allows users to identify which journals and articles that are most linguistically similar to a bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint as well as observe where the preprint would be positioned within a published article landscape.

URL : Examining linguistic shifts between preprints and publications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001470