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4 août 2021

Communication Research, the Geopolitics of Knowledge and Publishing in High-Impact Journals: The Chronicle of a Commodification Process Foretold

Authors : Víctor Manuel Marí Sáez, Clara Martins do Nascimento

The reforms in higher education that have been introduced on a global scale in recent years have gone hand in glove with the progressive imposition of scientific journal impact factors, all of which points to the rise of academic capitalism and digital labour in universities that is increasingly subject to the logic of the market.

A diachronic analysis of this process allows for talking about, paraphrasing Gabriel García Márquez, the chronicle of a commodification process foretold. More than twenty years ago it was clear what was going to happen, but not how it was going to unfold.

Accordingly, this article reconstructs that process, comparing the Spanish case with global trends and highlighting the crucial role that governmental agencies like the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation and specific evaluation tools like the publication of scientific papers in high-impact journals have played in it.

In this analysis, Wallerstein’s core-periphery relations and the concept of commodity fetishism, as addressed by Walter Benjamin, prove to be especially useful. The main research question posed in this article is as follows: What does the process of the commodification of communication research look like in Spain?

URL : Communication Research, the Geopolitics of Knowledge and Publishing in High-Impact Journals: The Chronicle of a Commodification Process Foretold

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1258

3 août 2021

Overburdening of peer reviewers: A multi-stakeholder perspective on causes and effects

Authors : Anna Severin, Joanna Chataway

Peer review of manuscripts is labour-intensive and time-consuming. Individual reviewers might feel themselves overburdened with the amount of reviewing they are requested to do. Aiming to explore how stakeholder groups perceive reviewing burden and what they believe to be the causes of a potential overburdening of reviewers, we conducted focus groups with early-, mid-, and senior career scholars, editors, and publishers.

By means of a thematic analysis, we aimed to identify the causes of overburdening of reviewers. First, we show that, across disciplines and roles, stakeholders believed that the reviewing burden is distributed unequally across members of the academic community, resulting in the overburdening of small groups of reviewers. Second, stakeholders believed this to be caused by (i) an increase in manuscript submissions; (ii) inefficient manuscript handling; (iii) lack of institutionalization of peer review; (iv) lack of reviewing instructions and (v) inadequate reviewer recruiting strategies.

These themes were assumed to relate to an inadequate incentive structure in academia that favours publications over peer review. In order to alleviate reviewing burden, a holistic approach is required that addresses both the increased demand for and the insufficient supply of reviewing resources.

URL : Overburdening of peer reviewers: A multi-stakeholder perspective on causes and effects

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1392

2 août 2021

Is rapid scientific publication also high quality? Bibliometric analysis of highly disseminated COVID-19 research papers

Authors : Amandeep Khatter, Michael Naughton, Hajira Dambha-Miller, Patrick Redmond

The impact of COVID-19 has underlined the need for reliable information to guide clinical practice and policy. This urgency has to be balanced against disruption to journal handling capacity and the continued need to ensure scientific rigour.

We examined the reporting quality of highly disseminated COVID-19 research papers using a bibliometric analysis examining reporting quality and risk of bias (RoB) amongst 250 top scoring Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) COVID-19 research papers between January and April 2020.

Method-specific RoB tools were used to assess quality. After exclusions, 84 studies from 44 journals were included. Forty-three (51%) were case series/studies, and only one was an randomized controlled trial.

Most authors were from institutions based in China (n = 44, 52%). The median AAS and impact factor was 2015 (interquartile range [IQR] 1,105–4,051.5) and 12.8 (IQR 5–44.2) respectively. Nine studies (11%) utilized a formal reporting framework, 62 (74%) included a funding statement, and 41 (49%) were at high RoB.

This review of the most widely disseminated COVID-19 studies highlights a preponderance of low-quality case series with few research papers adhering to good standards of reporting. It emphasizes the need for cautious interpretation of research and the increasingly vital responsibility that journals have in ensuring high-quality publications.

URL : Is rapid scientific publication also high quality? Bibliometric analysis of highly disseminated COVID-19 research papers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1403

2 août 2021

Total SciComm: A Strategy for Communicating Open Science

Authors : Manh-Toan Ho, Manh-Tung Ho, Quan-Hoang Vuong

This paper seeks to introduce a strategy of science communication: Total SciComm or all-out science communication. We proposed that to maximize the outreach and impact, scientists should use different media to communicate different aspects of science, from core ideas to methods.

The paper uses an example of a debate surrounding a now-retracted article in the Nature journal, in which open data, preprints, social media, and blogs are being used for a meaningful scientific conversation.

The case embodied the central idea of Total SciComm: the scientific community employs every medium to communicate scientific ideas and engages all scientists in the process.

URL : Total SciComm: A Strategy for Communicating Open Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9030031

2 août 2021

Data sharing practices and data availability upon request differ across scientific disciplines

Authors : Leho tedersoo, Rainer Küngas, Ester Oras, Kajar Köster, Helen Eenmaa, Äli Leijen, Margus Pedaste, Marju Raju, Anastasiya Astapova, Heli Lukner, Karin Kogermann, Tuul Sepp

Data sharing is one of the cornerstones of modern science that enables large-scale analyses and reproducibility. We evaluated data availability in research articles across nine disciplines in Nature and Science magazines and recorded corresponding authors’ concerns, requests and reasons for declining data sharing.

Although data sharing has improved in the last decade and particularly in recent years, data availability and willingness to share data still differ greatly among disciplines. We observed that statements of data availability upon (reasonable) request are inefficient and should not be allowed by journals.

To improve data sharing at the time of manuscript acceptance, researchers should be better motivated to release their data with real benefits such as recognition, or bonus points in grant and job applications.

We recommend that data management costs should be covered by funding agencies; publicly available research data ought to be included in the evaluation of applications; and surveillance of data sharing should be enforced by both academic publishers and funders. These cross-discipline survey data are available from the plutoF repository.

URL : Data sharing practices and data availability upon request differ across scientific disciplines

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00981-0

31 juillet 2021

Institutional Data Repository Development, a Moving Target

Authors : Colleen Fallaw, Genevieve Schmitt, Hoa Luong, Jason Colwell, Jason Strutz

At the end of 2019, the Research Data Service (RDS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) completed its fifth year as a campus-wide service. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the RDS in meeting the needs of Illinois researchers, RDS staff developed a five-year review consisting of a survey and a series of in-depth focus group interviews.

As a result, our institutional data repository developed in-house by University Library IT staff, Illinois Data Bank, was recognized as the most useful service offering by our unit. When launched in 2016, storage resources and web servers for Illinois Data Bank and supporting systems were hosted on-premises at UIUC.

As anticipated, researchers increasingly need to share large, and complex datasets. In a responsive effort to leverage the potentially more reliable, highly available, cost-effective, and scalable storage accessible to computation resources, we migrated our item bitstreams and web services to the cloud. Our efforts have met with success, but also with painful bumps along the way.

This article describes how we supported data curation workflows through transitioning from on-premises to cloud resource hosting. It details our approaches to ingesting, curating, and offering access to dataset files up to 2TB in size–which may be archive type files (e.g., .zip or .tar) containing complex directory structures.

URL : https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15821