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The Landscape of Scholarly Book Publishing in Croatia: Finding Pathways for Viable Open Access Models

Author : Iva Melinščak Zlodi

1) Background: Open access to scholarly works is globally recognized as a goal to be achieved as soon as possible; however, there is not yet a general understanding of how to achieve open access for books. In considering the most appropriate models of transition, an accurate and detailed insight into national and regional specifics can be of great importance.

The aim of this research is to show the current state of scholarly book publishing in Croatia: recognising the key stakeholders, their characteristics, and the current level of open access to scholarly books.

(2) Methods: The existing data from two different sources were used: the data about the public subsidies for book publishers by the Ministry of Science and Education and the data on published books from the Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI, both for the period from 2018 to 2021.

(3) Results: In the four-year period, 224 Croatian publishers were awarded subsidies to publish 2359 book titles. The majority of the publishers received support for only a small number of titles and relatively low amounts of subsidies. More than half of the titles are published by small private commercial publishers.

However, the uptake of digital publishing among commercial publishers is very modest. Open access to scholarly books is almost entirely in the domain of non-commercial publishers. Most open access titles are available on the websites of their publishers.

(4) Conclusions: The analysis of the data from these two sources have resulted in an overview of the current state of book publishing in Croatia. Such an overview provides a good basis for designing future measures and creating a national open science plan and can also be a useful contribution to international discussions.

URL : The Landscape of Scholarly Book Publishing in Croatia: Finding Pathways for Viable Open Access Models

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11010017

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EN

On the geopolitics of academic publishing: the mislocated centers of scholarly communication

Authors : Franciszek Krawczyk, Emanuel Kulczycki

Knowledge production is an important factor in establishing the geopolitical position of countries. In the recent heated discussion on predatory publishing, the geopolitical dimension of this topic is often ignored or treated superficially.

In this paper, we introduce the term “mislocated centres of scholarly communication” to help better understand the emergence of predatory journals, and journals that bear similarities to them, in geopolitical peripheries. Mislocated centers of scholarly communication are perceived in the peripheries as legitimized by the center but are in fact invisible or illegitimate in the center.

Thus, we argue the importance of viewing these mislocated centers as the result of unequal power relations in academia. To support our argument, we summarize the research on the topic of predatory publishing and demonstrate that predatory journals are a geopolitical problem because the geopolitical peripheries of science are much more often harmed by them than the center.

Unlike predatory journals, mislocated centers of scholarly communication are not necessarily fraudulent but rather they are geopolitical roles imposed on some journals by a dynamic between center and peripheries. Our approach could help to criticize this system without discriminating against peripheral scholars or journals.

URL : On the geopolitics of academic publishing: the mislocated centers of scholarly communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2021.1984641

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EN

Transparency in conducting and reporting research: A survey of authors, reviewers, and editors across scholarly disciplines

Authors : Mario Malički, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Lex Bouter, Adrian Mulligan, Gerben ter Riet

Calls have been made for improving transparency in conducting and reporting research, improving work climates, and preventing detrimental research practices. To assess attitudes and practices regarding these topics, we sent a survey to authors, reviewers, and editors. We received 3,659 (4.9%) responses out of 74,749 delivered emails.

We found no significant differences between authors’, reviewers’, and editors’ attitudes towards transparency in conducting and reporting research, or towards their perceptions of work climates. Undeserved authorship was perceived by all groups as the most prevalent detrimental research practice, while fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and not citing prior relevant research, were seen as more prevalent by editors than authors or reviewers.

Overall, 20% of respondents admitted sacrificing the quality of their publications for quantity, and 14% reported that funders interfered in their study design or reporting. While survey respondents came from 126 different countries, due to the survey’s overall low response rate our results might not necessarily be generalizable.

Nevertheless, results indicate that greater involvement of all stakeholders is needed to align actual practices with current recommendations.

URL : Transparency in conducting and reporting research: A survey of authors, reviewers, and editors across scholarly disciplines

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270054

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EN

Evolution of research data management in academic libraries: A review of the literature

Authors : Arslan Sheikh, Amara Malik, Rubina Adnan

This study provides insights into the evolution and conceptual framework of research data management (RDM). It also investigates the role of libraries and librarians in offering data management services and the challenges they face in this regard.

The study is qualitative in nature and based on an extensive literature review survey. The analysis of the reviewed literature reveals that the idea of RDM has emerged as a new addition to library research support services.

The more recent literature clearly established the pivotal role of libraries and librarians in developing and managing RDM services. However, data sharing practices and the development of RDM services in libraries are more prevalent in developed countries.

While these trends are still lacking among researchers and libraries in developing countries. Creating awareness among researchers about the benefits of data sharing is a challenging task for libraries.

Furthermore, institutional commitment, collaboration, academic engagement, technological infrastructure development, lack of policies, funding, and storage, skills, and competencies required for librarians to offer RDM-based services are some of the other significant challenges highlighted in the literature.

Certainly, RDM services are difficult and complicated; therefore, librarians need to master the skills of research data to offer library-based RDM services.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/02666669231157405

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EN

PreprintMatch: A tool for preprint to publication detection shows global inequities in scientific publication

Authors : Peter Eckmann, Anita Bandrowski

Preprints, versions of scientific manuscripts that precede peer review, are growing in popularity. They offer an opportunity to democratize and accelerate research, as they have no publication costs or a lengthy peer review process. Preprints are often later published in peer-reviewed venues, but these publications and the original preprints are frequently not linked in any way.

To this end, we developed a tool, PreprintMatch, to find matches between preprints and their corresponding published papers, if they exist. This tool outperforms existing techniques to match preprints and papers, both on matching performance and speed. PreprintMatch was applied to search for matches between preprints (from bioRxiv and medRxiv), and PubMed.

The preliminary nature of preprints offers a unique perspective into scientific projects at a relatively early stage, and with better matching between preprint and paper, we explored questions related to research inequity.

We found that preprints from low income countries are published as peer-reviewed papers at a lower rate than high income countries (39.6% and 61.1%, respectively), and our data is consistent with previous work that cite a lack of resources, lack of stability, and policy choices to explain this discrepancy.

Preprints from low income countries were also found to be published quicker (178 vs 203 days) and with less title, abstract, and author similarity to the published version compared to high income countries. Low income countries add more authors from the preprint to the published version than high income countries (0.42 authors vs 0.32, respectively), a practice that is significantly more frequent in China compared to similar countries.

Finally, we find that some publishers publish work with authors from lower income countries more frequently than others.

URL : PreprintMatch: A tool for preprint to publication detection shows global inequities in scientific publication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281659

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EN

Data Management Librarians Role in a Large Interdisciplinary Scientific Grant for PFAS Remediation: Considerations and Recommendations

Authors : Jennifer Chaput, Renee Walsh

This article explores the conflicts, disparities, and inequalities experienced by two librarians when collaborating on a federal grant proposal. The authors discuss concerns related to time and salary expectations and the inequities that can occur during faculty and staff collaborations on research grants.

The bureaucratic structure and the job classifications of staff at academic institutions in addition to the contract limitations of non-faculty status librarian positions can hinder successful collaborations. The authors also describe data management needs that may occur when working with interdisciplinary research teams and detail the type of work that is included in writing a data management grant.

This article concludes with considerations and recommendations for other data librarians who may undertake similar projects with a focus on ways to create parity between faculty and staff collaborators.

URL : Data Management Librarians Role in a Large Interdisciplinary Scientific Grant for PFAS Remediation: Considerations and Recommendations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.616

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EN

An open automation system for predatory journal detection

Authors : Li‑Xian Chen, Shih‑Wen Su, Chia‑Hung Liao, Kai‑Sin Wong, Shyan‑Ming Yuan

The growing number of online open-access journals promotes academic exchanges, but the prevalence of predatory journals is undermining the scholarly reporting process. Data collection, feature extraction, and model prediction are common steps in tools designed to distinguish between legitimate and predatory academic journals and publisher websites.

The authors include them in their proposed academic journal predatory checking (AJPC) system based on machine learning methods. The AJPC data collection process extracts 833 blacklists and 1213 whitelists information from websites to be used for identifying words and phrases that might indicate the presence of predatory journals.

Feature extraction is used to identify words and terms that help detect predatory websites, and the system’s prediction stage uses eight classification algorithms to distinguish between potentially predatory and legitimate journals.

We found that enhancing the classification efficiency of the bag of words model and TF-IDF algorithm with diff scores (a measure of differences in specific word frequencies between journals) can assist in identifying predatory journal feature words.

Results from performance tests suggest that our system works as well as or better than those currently being used to identify suspect publishers and publications.

The open system only provides reference results rather than absolute opinions and accepts user inquiries and feedback to update the system and optimize performance.

URL : An open automation system for predatory journal detection

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30176-z